


Giant, Anguish, Danger

by MalMuses



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bedsharing, Body Horror, Camping, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Dean Winchester Needs to Use Actual Words, Fluff, Grumpy Castiel (Supernatural), Horror Movie Tropes, Impaling and flaying (Briefly described not graphic), Lots of UST but eventually resolved, M/M, MINOR CHARACTER DEATH (Not a Winchester or Castiel), Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, Mythical Monster, Pining, Sam needs a Break, Sexual Tension, TFW in the woods, They should have listened to Kevin, smores
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-04-12 07:16:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 73,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19127209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalMuses/pseuds/MalMuses
Summary: Dean is drowning in guilt and nightmares. From kicking Castiel out of the bunker to letting an angel possess his brother, he has recently made some poor choices in tight corners.A road trip up to snowy northern Minnesota for what they think will be an open-and-shut Wendigo case offers the tense, battered team a chance to refocus and bond. However, almost as soon as they get there, something is not right; the very forest itself seems to conspire against them.The hunters become the hunted, finding runes carved into trees, bodies, dreams that leak into reality, and an idol with horns for hands—in the words of Kevin Tran: “WHAT IS HAPPENING?”Canon Divergent from partway through Season 9: Surviving Kevin Tran, Gadreel Expelled, (Very weak) Angelic Castiel. Inspired by‘The Ritual’.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's HERE!
> 
> I'm so excited to share this fic, y'all! <3 I'm always excited to post something new, but I feel like I've been sitting on this fic for an absolute age. I wrote it in its initial state months ago, and then I entered it for SPN MBB and had the amazing luck for it to be claimed by the totally awesome jdragon122!! Please guys, check out her art chapter at the end of this fic (like credits for a movie!) and give her tumblr etc a peek... she is amazing :))
> 
> VIPs: jscribbles, son_of_a_bitch_spn_family, CR_Noble, and Wargurl86. This fic wouldn't be what it is without you all.
> 
> Now... the fic.
> 
> It's been a little while since I put out a chunky canon fic! It was so much fun to ground myself back into what made this characters tick at this point in canon - we're returning to Season 9. I had such a good time though, I'll definitely be coming back to canon again soon.
> 
> I hope you give it a chance, and enjoy it! 
> 
> Let me know what you think, as always I'll be responding to comments on every chapter and I love to chat with you all. 
> 
> \- Mal <3

 

 

 

_All the witches_

_spring from Witolf,_

_All the warlocks_

_are of Willharm,_

_And the spell-singers_

_spring from Swarthead;_

_All the Jötunn_

_of Ymir come._

 

 **“** Völuspá hin skamma” – _The Short Prophecy, 13th Century._

 

 

**Chapter One**

Dean was dreaming. Despite the fantastically comfortable memory foam mattress, the warm blankets, and the tot of whiskey before turning in, Dean wasn't dreaming pleasantly.

_The gas station was dim, illuminated only by the constant, irritating flickering of a street lamp not far from the front window; the light was yellowish and off, bathing the shelves of chips, sodas, cigarettes, and pine-scented, tree-shaped air fresheners in a strange glow. It was far too quiet; no patrons, the door closed, the sign turned, gas pumps empty._

_One foot in front of the other, Dean headed inexorably toward the back. Up to the cash register, a turn to the right, eight steps forward. He’d been here so many times already; he could have found the door blindfolded. Watching his own hand, unable to control its movement, Dean reached for the door of the tiny stock room._

_The eerie golden light that suffused the store reached through the widening crack as the door opened, spilling onto the tiled floor within. The line of light bent and wiggled as it hit an object in the middle of the floor; thick, puffy, navy fabric that looked worn, too worn. The sleeping bag was second- or third-hand at best, probably from the Goodwill down the street. Dean knew all of this, but in the dream, all he saw were the dark-blue lumps of fabric that announced Castiel’s feet._

_He didn’t seem to sleep well. A soft snore came intermittently. One hand pulled out of the sleeping bag to grasp around the strap of the backpack that lay next to him on the floor. It pained Dean to see how quickly his best friend had learned not to let go of his meager possessions, even when he was resting. On the street, he hadn’t been able to trust anybody. Perhaps he would have lost that affliction again quickly enough, if he’d had somewhere safe to stay._

_If._

_The heavy stone of guilt that had filled Dean’s stomach for weeks came to him now even in a dream, as it did every time he ended up in this place._

_“Cas.”_

_He heard his own voice, wishing he could stop himself. Wishing he had any control over this recurrent, horrifying dream. He knew what was coming, but he could neither stop it nor wake._

_So instead he went with it, feeling the blame and the shame flow through him as Cas awoke. This was his fault. It was all his fault. He’d let Cas down._

_As Cas’s bright blue eyes caught the yellow light, opening as he slowly scrambled his way out of the sleeping bag, Dean’s breath caught the way it always did. Cas looked scruffy, tired, frayed. The way anyone would look, Dean supposed, if they worked double shifts and their only home was the floor of a stock room of a gas station, taking illicit naps after hours. Cas had some stubble on his chin and dark circles beneath his eyes. He was a little thinner than Dean had usually known him, somehow smaller looking all over without his grace filling him. Dean still thought he was beautiful._

_Human and alone, Cas stumbled from his sleeping bag to find the source of the noise._

_He couldn’t see Dean, of course. The dream wouldn’t be such torture if Cas could see him; if Dean could speak, could warn him, could apologize._

_Instead, he followed as Cas moved out into the aisles, peering around with his signature squint to see who, or what, had called his name. He slept with his shoes and work vest on, mostly for warmth but also because, Dean knew, he didn’t have anything else to change in to. Perhaps, with a few more paychecks, he’d have been able to pick out some clothes of his own. Dean would never know._

_All he could do was follow. He moved behind Cas, out to the door of the Gas’n’Sip. The ex-angel’s features appeared jagged in the strange shadows caused by the flickering light, but Dean still studied them as if he’d never see them again. Here, in his dream, he could look all he wanted; during waking hours, he could barely meet Cas’s gaze._

_Too much guilt, too much shame._

_He knew it was coming, but Dean still gasped and cried out as the windows of the gas station imploded suddenly, shattering glistening specks of glass across Castiel as he shielded his face with his arms. Cas stood back up, looking around, scared. Confused._

_Dean wanted to close his eyes, but what was the point? He’d still see it._

_Cas’s attention jolted up, as it always did. Straight to Dean. His hand came forward, reaching out as if for something he couldn’t quite make out._

_“Dean?” Cas whispered, a question in a name before it devolved into a high-pitched scream._

_The angel blade burst through his best friend’s chest as it always did._

Dean sat up suddenly, wide awake, the same scream on his own lips.

Quickly, he turned his face into the pillow, bringing up a fist to shove into his mouth and bit down. Eight nights in a row now, he’d woken like this. His knuckles were bruised, though luckily, in his profession, no one questioned that.

Dean rolled to the edge of the bed, knowing that going straight back to sleep was an entirely hopeless idea. He grabbed the gray, embroidered robe from the end of his bed and slipped it on, padding his way barefoot out into the tiled corridor.

He made his way up to the library, to check on Cas as he had to do every night if there was to be any hope of more rest.

 

 

 

 

Morning brought with it a cup of coffee already waiting on the kitchen counter.

“Thanks, Cas,” Dean muttered, slipping down onto his usual stool in the kitchen. He leaned forward, elbows down, bracing his arms on the countertop so he could take his first few lifegiving sips.

“You’re welcome.” Cas nodded rather than smiled, not looking at Dean but instead down at the screen of his phone.

Sam had gotten Cas set back up with a new phone as quickly as he could and begged him to use it. Pleaded with Cas to ask them if he needed anything, to just let them know what was going on with him, to not disappear. By “us”, of course, Sam really meant him. He didn’t trust Dean right now, Dean remembered. Cas had nodded and, true to his word, the only times he’d left the bunker since were accompanied by a quick text of his location. Sometimes even an emoji.

Dean pulled his phone out of his pocket, running his thumb along the screen to unlock and idly check who the last person to text him had been.

It’d been Crowley. _Moose forgiven you yet? Hope so. You’re so dull when you’re miserable._

It was funny, Dean thought, that the only one who’d even noticed how miserable he was, was the King of Hell.

Dean was snapped out of his self-flagellating reverie by the thunk of a laptop as it was set down on the counter next to him.

“Hunt,” was all Sam said, already disappearing out of the kitchen.

Dean caught enough of an eyeful of Sam’s back to notice that he was still in pajamas at gone seven in the morning, which means that he hadn’t been running. Dean was both glad for it and cut up about it. It meant Sam was resting, but it also served as a sharp indicator of how unwell he still was.

With Sam gone and Cas silent, Dean busied himself with his coffee mug and the laptop screen.

 _Man, 27, found hanging in a tree on Red Lake tribal lands, bringing the death toll to four,_ the headline of the Angle Inlet Tribune announced. Further reading informed Dean that Angle Inlet was one of the most northerly points of the United States, a tiny lump of Minnesota that was only pretending not to be Canada. Dean wrinkled his nose. It was late October. There’d be snow, he just knew it. Was Sam trying to punish him?

With a sigh, he carried on reading. The man, Luke Hutch, had been snowshoeing in the Northwest Angle State Forest with friends and had been separated from the group. He’d been found three days later, impaled in the branches of a tree. He wasn’t the first, either; three others had been found the previous week, though those bodies were older. Locals had been reported strange noises in the forest, odd tracks, but no sightings at all. Luke had just walked off into the forest it seemed; as if he completely trusted whoever or whatever tempted him to do so.

Dean spun the laptop around, pointing the screen toward Cas.

“Whad’ya think?” he asked. “Wendigo?”

Cas’s vivid, if tired, blue eyes dragged up from the phone to stoically study the screen. “Yes,” he intoned simply. “Seems likely.”

Keeping his internal sigh at Cas’s emotional distance all to himself, Dean turned the laptop back around. He quickly chugged down the rest of his coffee and carried on reading.

The police, it seemed, were struggling to investigate the deaths, as the bodies had been found on land belonging to the Red Lake Nation. A little Googling told Dean that they were a band of Chippewa Indians, federally recognized, whose Reservation spanned across over eight hundred thousand acres of land and water in northern Minnesota. It seemed that the Chippewa weren't fully cooperative in the case, and—Dean suspected—the police were probably not being as respectful as they should of the remote community they were investigating.

“Should we call someone else?” Cas asked quietly, and Dean jumped, looking up to see that the angel was watching him intently.

“Uh,” Dean responded eloquently. “I dunno.” He reached up, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Maybe we should.”

Cas nodded, but he seemed thoughtful. “It’s not like any of us are in the best state to be going,” he noted. “Sam is almost well, but the prophet is…skittish. And I am not as much use as I should be.”

“You’re just fine, Cas,” Dean snapped, frowning, though they both knew it was far from the truth. Also true, was the fact that Sam was far from optimum, and Kevin would have to come, though it was likely he shouldn’t.

Dean sighed. “But…”

Cas waited, his gaze unwavering.

“Perhaps it would do us all good,” Dean said, realizing with a sinking feeling that he was going to advise they all went trooping through the snow after all. “Maybe a hunt will distract us all from…everything.”

He was going to say, “from diving down each other’s throats every five seconds and finding excuses to yell at each other”, but that seemed to be obvious.

Cas raised an eyebrow. His expression seemed to recognize Dean’s response, but he said nothing.

Dean returned to the laptop screen, turning his attention to researching Northwest Angle State Forest, and working out a plan for their hunt. Reluctantly, he flicked open the notepad app on his phone and began to make a list of cold-weather camping gear they would need for the trip.

Sam appeared in the doorway while Dean was tapping away at his phone screen, now dressed in worn jeans and soft plaid.

“Decided to pass it on to someone else, I suppose?” Sam asked, his voice flat. His intonation said clearly that he thought Dean would have decided without him, rendering Sam mute and incapable.

Dean bit back an unnecessary retort. “No,” he said calmly. “We should go. It’ll be good for us.”

The look of surprise that ghosted over Sam’s face was quickly pushed aside by suspicion. “You think I’m capable of going?” he questioned, eyes narrowed.

“Honestly, no.” Dean put his phone down on the table and spread his hands defensively. “If I had my way, you, and Kevin, and Cas would never leave this bunker again. But I am trying—” he added quickly, seeing anger building on Sam’s features, “—to stop making decisions for other people.”

Sam regarded him quietly for a minute, before nodding. “Kevin’s gonna be pissed,” he noted.

“You don’t think he’ll be relieved to get out of the bunker?” Cas offered up from his side of the table, eventually turning his calm gaze across to Sam.

“He will be until he realizes we’ll be camping in the snow,” Sam said, a slightly wry grin on his face. “Don’t really see him as the outdoorsy type.”

Dean spotted the tiny, amused smirk that moved across Cas’s lips, even if no one else would have.

Sam moved further into the kitchen, moving to pour himself a cup of coffee from the carafe that still sat on the warmer. “Gonna be pretty cold,” he noted, to the wall.

“Yeah. Likely a wendigo,” Dean muttered, eyeing his empty cup. “You know how it is. Probably a harsh winter that drove them to resort to human cannibalism in the first place, and they seem to get an affinity for it when they transform. Only really ever see them up in the cold north,” he mused.

Sam merely grunted, taking his coffee and moving back across the kitchen. “I’m going to pack. You can give Kevin the good news,” he replied, his back already to Dean as he headed out into the corridor.

“Great.” Dean sighed to himself. “I guess I’m now bad-news guy.”

“Seems to be your habit of late, yes,” Cas responded dryly as he rose from his stool and made his way wordlessly to the coffee maker.

Dean blinked. “Damn, Cas. That was cold.”

The tiny smirk ran past again. “No, Dean. Minnesota is cold. I’m just speaking the truth, as no one else around here seems to want to, currently.”

“Yeah,” Dean grumbled. “I’ve gotta give you that one.”

Without mentioning it, Cas pressed another cup of coffee into Dean’s hands. They looked at each other, lingering for a just a moment before Cas turned toward the door that led deeper into the bunker.

“I’ll gather the camping gear,” he said helpfully, disappearing off down the corridor.

Sipping the coffee gratefully, Dean decided to finish the cup in the kitchen, just so that he could procrastinate on waking the prophet for a while longer. Perhaps he could pack up all his stuff for him and then wake him just long enough to bundle him into the car, Dean pondered. That might cut down the length of the fight a little.

 

 

“You do realize,” Kevin began before they’d reached the end of the road, “that this drive is going to take us fourteen hours.”

“Actually, Kevin,” Cas responded calmly from the seat next to him in the back. “Angle Inlet, Minnesota, will probably take us around twelve hours and fifty-seven minutes to reach from Lebanon if you follow the usual road patterns and allow for Dean’s slightly above-average driving speed.”

“Above average diving speed?” Dean protested. “I drive perfectly—”

“We won’t be driving in Baby the entire way,” Cas interrupted, still with that air of calm that was beginning to get on Dean’s nerves. “The usual route to Northwest Angle State Forest would involve us crossing into Canada and then re-entering the US once we’d gone around Buffalo Bay, but it would be wise for us all to avoid border control and pay off someone to take us straight from Birch Beach to Angle Inlet by boat.”

“Boat?” Dean narrowed his eyes distrustfully over the top of the steering wheel as his gaze rested on the tarmac, tracing the yellow lines ahead that increasingly felt like they were leading to a horrible idea.

“Well, the other option is a biplane over the bay,” Sam offered dryly from the passenger seat, the first words he’d spoken since the kitchen.

“Right. Boat.” Dean nodded. “Gotcha.”

“So, we get over the water and get to Angle Inlet,” Kevin said, his voice bratty rather than helpful, “then what? We stagger around in the snow for days?”

“That’s about the sum of it, yeah,” Sam responded, casting his tired-looking hazel eyes sideways at Dean. “Unless our fearless commander has any other ideas.”

Dean felt a frustrated bustle of tension begin to build in his hands and neck, and he tightened his hands around the familiar leather of the Impala’s steering wheel to control it. “I’m nobody’s commander,” he pointed out, forcing his voice low and slow. “But people are dying out there, killed by some monster, and last I checked, that’s what we do. Save people. Hunt things.”

Silence cut the car for a few minutes before Sam broke it.

“Yeah. You’re right. So, let's do that.” He nodded, and while it wasn’t peace, it was better than they’d been doing recently.

As the silence had been broken, Kevin seemed to gauge that it was an excellent time to speak up again. “Still very annoyed to be here, for the record.”

“We know.” Cas sighed, and Dean flicked his eyes up to the rearview mirror just in time to catch the angel’s dramatic eye roll. Something about the sight of Cas’s grumpy gesture lessened some of the stress in Dean’s chest, rolling a slow exhale from his lungs that took some of his bad mood with it. Yes, it was a petulant, pointless gesture. But it was Cas. It was so very Cas, the Cas he knew, the Cas he’d missed.

Dean smiled, just a little, reaching over to turn up the music as their conversation seemed to have drawn to a close. Iron Maiden’s “Lightning Strikes Twice” filled the gaps between the men in the car, briefly forcing out the unforgiving tension and silent disagreement that hovered around them, unwanted.

The 1967 Chevy Impala was a beautiful car, a reasonably comfortable road trip vehicle with the work Dean did on her, but she was pretty heavy on fuel. They’d only been driving a couple of hours when Dean made to pull over into a remote gas station. Everyone got out to stretch their legs; Kevin hurried to the bathroom, Sam disappeared inside for some form of snack that didn’t have any numbers in the ingredients, Cas wandered across the forecourt, and Dean moved to the side of the car to top her up.

He flicked the gas cap open, leaning onto the roof as he watched the numbers on the gas pump tick upwards.

“Did I do something wrong, Dean?”

Cas’s blunt question from behind him took Dean by surprise, and he almost dropped the gas nozzle as he jumped.

“Shit, Cas. I thought you went inside with Sam and Kevin.”

“Why?” Cas raised an eyebrow. “I no longer need to snack, Dean, or urinate.”

“Right.” Dean smiled tightly. “Of course.”

“So?” Cas tilted his head, taking in Dean with his unnervingly blue gaze. “Did I do something wrong? I feel like you’re…” Cas paused, considering his words carefully, “I feel like you’re tip-toeing around me. The atmosphere has been tense ever since I returned, and I confess I don’t know why. I thought it would pass, but it’s getting worse.”

Dean slammed the gas nozzle back into the holder, pulling B. Lovett’s credit card out of the machine with his other hand. He slipped the card into his back pocket, glancing at Cas but remaining quiet as he ducked back behind the wheel.

He heard Cas give an exasperated sigh, and he wanted to kick himself.

“Hey,” Dean turned his head, looking back to where Cas stood, hand outstretched to the handle of the back door, about to climb back into the Impala. “Want to ride up front with me?”

They looked at each other for a long moment, the gas station perfectly still around them, until Sam and Kevin stepped out onto the forecourt, arguing loudly back and forth about appropriate road trip snacks. A tiny smile passed over Cas’s features then, and he moved around to snag the front seat before Sam could.

 

 

 

A scruffy, gray roadside motel in North Dakota with a filled-in pool and a broken vending machine wasn’t exactly luxury, but knowing they were likely going be enjoying tents in the snow for a few days soon, none of the group complained.

“What are we doing about dinner?” Kevin asked from his seat in the back of the Impala as Dean brought the car around to their rooms, parking between the two adjacent doors.

“There’s a pizza place down the road a mile,” said Sam thoughtfully, peering at his phone screen. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m too tired to go any further.”

Mumbled noises of assent around the car was the only response he got.

“Alright,” Dean raised a hand, holding up two plastic room keys. “Two twins, how’re we dividing them?”

Sam reached over the headrest and pulled one of the cards from Dean’s fingers, looking over to Kevin. “I’ll take the kid. Cas snores when he sleeps, he’s all yours.”

Cas looked offended, but Kevin spoke up before he could retort.

“Wait, Cas is still sleeping?”

Dean looked in the rear-view mirror, glaring at Kevin. “Yes. Cas is sleeping. We’ll take the one on the left.” He nodded toward the motel room and unclipped his seatbelt, indicating that his part in the discussion was over.

“But, why?” Kevin continued with a scowl, unconcerned. He looked around the car, squinting almost distrustfully at them all.

“I, uh,” Cas cleared his throat. “I’m not exactly up to full power yet. While my grace recuperates, resting much as a human would tends to help. I wouldn’t mind—” Cas paused for a second, shooting his blue eyes over to rest uncertainly on Dean before he tried again. “—I wouldn’t mind some of that pizza, either, if that’s okay.”

Dean’s mouth set in a thin line, but he managed not to say anything as he turned to get out of the car. As he moved over toward the room, he heard Sam reply to Kevin in a hushed tone.

“It takes Cas a little while to replenish his grace sometimes. Dean’s,” Sam sighs then continues, “Dean’s not doing so well with it, right now. So maybe drop it.”

“Oh, so another thing we’re just not gonna talk about, yay!” Kevin bitched quietly to himself as he swung open the Impala door, stepping out onto the cracked concrete. He moved around the car to the front, passing by Cas as he exited and coming to a stop next to Dean. “Do you think the pizza place delivers? I could at least get back to working on my notes from the bunker if—”

“Yeah, sure,” Dean interrupted, sliding the key quickly down the side of the electronic lock on his door. “Whatever,” he said, before stepping inside. The door slammed shut behind him, leaving Kevin frowning at it, alone.

From within the room, Dean heard the voices outside continue.

“Sam?”

“Yeah?” Sam responded to Kevin as he called, heavy _thunks_ punctuating his words as he dropped their duffle bags out of the trunk onto the floor.

“Your brother is a douche.”

“Yeah, kinda,” Sam responded, oddly chipper. “Some things never change, no matter how many apocalypses we ride though. Dean is just Dean.”

“Well, Dean is an a-hole.”

“Kevin,” came Cas’s chastising voice. “Dean has been through a lot recently, too. Try to remember that.” There was a pause, and Dean could picture Cas turning his gaze to Sam. “Both of you.”

With that, heavy footfalls headed across the concrete, and Cas was pushing open the door behind him.

Dean stepped forward so that the door wouldn’t hit him in the back and gave a long exhale as he quickly took in the room. Shades of mustard and brown, a vomit-inducing throwback to the seventies if there ever was one, took up every space that wasn’t cheap, peeling, paneled wood. As fleabag motels went, it was fine.

He lowered himself to the end of the first bed and reached down to start untying his boots. Dean heard Cas walk past him to drop his duffle on the end of the other bed, and without looking up, he muttered, “Cas, you gotta stop defending me, man.”

“Why?”

Dean didn’t need to look up to see the fucking head tilt. It was there. He could sense it by now.

“I don’t deserve it, Cas, we both know that.”

There was a long moment of silence while Cas deposited his angel blade onto the nightstand from his coat sleeve and placed himself down on the end of his bed, sitting stiffly. Then, just when the quiet was about to stretch a little too long, his soft response cut the distance. “I quite disagree, Dean. But I’ll admit, despite my faith in you, even I am baffled by your recent behavior.”

Dean looked up, incredulous, to see Cas sat looking at him, with his hands spread.

“Talk to me, Dean.”

“Alright.” Dean sat up straight, shucking off his khaki jacket and grinning disarmingly. “I will. Toppings?”

Cas frowned. “What?”

“You wanted pizza. So, toppings?” Dean turned his shit-eating grin fully onto Cas, knowing full well that the angel would not be satisfied with his spinning of the conversation, but refusing to play Dr. Phil in a gross, time-capsule motel in wintery North Dakota.

For a few seconds, Cas merely sat and stared with a sour look. Then he sighed and shrugged slowly. “Get what you want. It all tastes the same to me anyway.”

Dean swallowed down a sudden, bitter-tasting wave of self-loathing, and ordered the pizza.

He took a shower, leaving Cas to browse the motel’s ancient TV while he cleaned up, and by the time he was done the pizza was waiting on his bed. Cas took a single slice, nibbling his way through it almost reluctantly, before laying down on his side and pulling the blanket up, trench coat and all.

Dean tossed and turned for most of the night, knowing only nightmares awaited him. 

 

 

 

Birch Beach was bright and sunny, fresh despite the ugly temperature. Seagulls circled noisily overhead as Baby made her way very slowly down the dock the next evening. Dean guided her expertly past fishing crates and piles of netting, dodging unperturbed sailors and running children as he took her to the very end of the sharp, salty-smelling quay.

“The guy at the diner this morning said our best chance would be The Looney,” Sam mused, staring down at the notes on his phone. “So, I guess that’s who we should start with if we can find her.”

“The Looney?” Kevin questioned, leaning forward between the two front seats to peer out of the front windscreen.

“It’s a reference to the Minnesota state bird, the Loon, as well as a play on the word for a Canadian coin, I believe, due to its operations,” Sam informed him, scrolling through some more notes. “The boat is registered to a D. Kruffin, but I don’t think that’s his real name if he runs people past the Canadian border as a hobby.”

“Why are we avoiding Canada, again?” Kevin questioned, peering out along the dock as Dean neared the end, where larger ships moored.

“Nothing wrong with Canada,” Dean commented. “But we’re not exactly the best people to pass through border control. Dead serial killers and all.”

Kevin’s eyes widened slightly, but he nodded. “Right. Of course.” His curiosity seemingly sated, he sat back into his seat.

Cas was silent, staring out of the side window over the water as Dean pulled up in front of a large, plain-looking cargo ship. She was a slightly peeling black and white vessel with chipped, red lettering that curled out “The Looney” on her hull.

“Easy enough,” Dean commented, pointing somewhat redundantly as he cut the engine. Baby sighed and ticked as she rested, seemingly put out by the temperature. “There she blows.”

“There she blows?” Sam echoed, raising an eyebrow. “Really, Dean?”

“It’s a boat; gotta use the lingo, Sam.”

“It’s a cargo ship,” Kevin pointed out. “No sails. She’s not blowing anywhere.”

Dean glared at them both in turn before huffing out an exasperated sigh. Baby creaked in protest as he swung open the driver-side door, swinging his legs out onto the cold quay. Without waiting for any of the others, he strode across to the concrete edge of the dock to where a wide, commercial ramp led up into the belly of the ship. Looking around, Dean saw no one. He stepped onto the ramp, intending to head into the vessel and find someone who worked on it, but immediately as his foot hit the solid incline a man appeared from within as if summoned by a single strange boot on his ship.

“Do I know ya?” the man chirped, his voice friendly enough, but his face scrunched into a distrustful squint. His skin was tan, incredibly windswept, and his tall, weather-bundled frame topped with a red knit beanie.

“No, sir,” Dean shook his head. “Not yet at least. My friends and I,” he turned to gesture back at the Impala, where Sam, Cas, and Kevin all peered across at them, waiting, “are hoping to get to Angle Inlet.”

The man raised one very dark eyebrow, so high it met the wool of his hat. “And?”

“Well, uh,” Dean reached up to rub the back of his neck. “A little birdie told us you might have some advice on how to get there.”

The man squinted harder. “Yeah, I do, son. Ya get back on the main road, in town, and head for border control. Or ya charter one of these bigger ships down there,” he jerked his thumb back up the quay, gesturing to his neighbors.

“We’ve got cash,” Dean said simply.

A slow nod. “Got enough to buy a fella a coffee?” he asked, indicating a dingy café that backed onto the dock itself. “Thirsty work, loadin’ cargo.”

“I bet it is,” Dean smiled thinly, stepping aside so the taller man could move down the ramp. “I bet a bite to eat wouldn’t hurt either,” he greased gently.

“Sure wouldn’t,” the man grinned, finally extending a hand. “I’m Dom. Nice t’ meet ya, mister…?”

“Dean, just Dean.”

“Fair enough, son. Let’s go.”

The café turned out to be more of a shack, with a single employee. The giant of a man, wide as he was tall, ebony-skinned and with a rag tied over his balding head, seemed to be very familiar with this arrangement.

“Ay, Dom,” he greeted with a bright white grin. “One of your coffees is it?”

“Sure is, Gino. We’ll be in the back.”

Opening an unassuming door in the corner, Dom led Dean out to a tiny patio. It smelled like an enclosure for smokers, surrounded by high concrete walls and completely barren. Dom leaned against the wall, sliding his knitted beanie from his head a moment, to reveal a severely receding dark hairline, before resetting it.

“You want to take the car, then?” Dom chipped cheerfully, straight to the point.

“Yessir, if we can,” Dean admitted. “Life’s a lot easier with wheels.”

“Well, there’s not a lot of driving to be done around Angle Inlet,” Dom pointed out. “Mostly hikin’. But that’s ya business I suppose, not mine. I ain’t gonna ask any questions, and neither are you.”

Dean nodded.

Dom held out his right hand, flat, and nodded down at it. “You mentioned cash?”

Dean sighed internally, and pulled out his wallet, dropping hundred-dollar bills one by one into Dom’s slim, outstretched palm.

Eventually, when Dean was about to challenge him, Dom nodded. “That’ll do ya. I smuggle; I don’t rob.” Taking the notes, he recounted them, folded them neatly, and tucked them into his shirt pocket. “We leave at sundown, and we don’t go fast. Only takes about an hour, but we gotta wait til a friend o’ mine opens up at the Inlet before ya can disembark, so all your friends can sleep on board with ya.”

“Appreciate it,” Dean nodded briskly.

“Comin’ back soon?” Dom asked, pausing with one hand on the door.

“Hopefully,” Dean hedged.

“Well, I’ll give ya a number to call to get a ride back. But if you’re more than a week, it ain’t gonna happen, son. Shit outta luck.”

Dean frowned, unsure as to what Dom was getting at. “What do you mean?” he asked carefully.

“Ice, boy,” Dom laughed. “This ain’t the South, y’ know. Give it another week or so, the Lake’ll freeze, and The Looney’ll be iced-in till spring.”

“Oh, right,” Dean chuckled. “I see. Well, guess we’re hurrying then.”

Dom nodded in agreement, pulling open the door to admit them back into the grimy café. “Coffee’s on me after all,” he winked. “Go get that sweet car o’ yours parked up inside The Looney. I’ll bring ‘em over.”

 

Dean slipped below deck to the bunks Dom had assigned them early in the evening, leaving Cas and Sam above to enjoy the bitingly cold wind that blew across the water. Temperature hadn’t ever bothered Cas as an angel, as far as Dean could recall, but clearly, Sam’s brain was still scrambled if he enjoyed the frigid northern air. Either that or he _really_ didn’t want to be in Dean’s company.

He’d headed down to the dormitories and left them to it; they had two simple rooms, each with a rack for luggage and a set of bunk beds. Dean flopped onto the bottom bunk. He pulled over his laptop and eased it open on his thighs as he sat with his back against the wall, feet popped out over the side of the mattress.

Decorated only with peeling safety procedure stickers, the room was tiny, beige and windowless, which Dean didn’t mind at all; he wasn’t bothered by boats like he was by, say, airplanes, but generally, he preferred it when his feet were firmly on land, in all instances. The less chance he had to roll over and peer out at the dark, icing Lake of the Woods that they floated on, the better.

Dean knew Sam would have had something to say if he’d have spotted him doing further research, and hell, he was probably right. Additional research wasn’t really Dean’s thing. But something about this case was making him nervous, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He’d thought, to start with, that it was just the awkwardness of the current state of bunker family relations that was bothering him, but the more he sat and squinted at free online newspapers, the more he realized that there was something else. Something didn’t add up.

Thirty minutes or so passed before there was a polite knock on the door, and it eased open to admit Cas. He paused in the doorway, one knuckle still on the door, and peered inside.

“May I come in, Dean?”

“Sure. It’s your room too.”

“Right,” Cas nodded, moving in and making to close the door behind him. “I just didn’t wish to disturb you if you wanted some time for yourself.”

“Well, I appreciate the thought, but honestly, I’ve had more than enough time for myself lately.”

The door closed with a click and Cas stood with his back to it for a moment, frowning uncertainly as if unsure how to take Dean’s comment. When Dean looked up from the laptop to see why Cas was still and silent, he finally nodded and moved toward the bed.

When he reached the edge of the frame, he stopped and looked the bunks up and down, his expression unreadable. “Bunk beds,” he said.

“Yup.”

“I’ve never slept in one before.”

“Really?” Dean raised an eyebrow, pulling his feet up onto the mattress and crossing his legs. “Not as a human?”

“No, Dean,” Cas replied calmly, lowering himself to sit on the edge of the bottom bed, a few feet away from Dean. “When I was human I mostly slept on concrete streets. A bit of cardboard if I was lucky, or a thin hostel mat if I could afford it. Or the floor of the stockroom, of course.”

Dean’s mouth went dry, and he immediately turned his attention back to the laptop.

“Dean?”

Dean tried to acknowledge Cas through the thick cotton of his mouth, but it wasn’t happening. Instead, he focused intently on the laptop screen, his bright green eyes darkening as they bored through it.

“Dean,” Cas’s voice was softer, and he leaned closer. “Every time my being human comes up, you suddenly get that constipated look on your face and stop talking. I didn’t intend to fall, Dean. I’m sorry that I wasn’t useful, and that I wasn’t able to help with Sam, or—”

“Shut up, Cas,” Dean interrupted forcefully.

The angel’s mouth snapped shut, but his brow furrowed deeply, his blue eyes turned to Dean with an open scowl.

For a few minutes, thick silence suffused the room and clung to them both, like a heavy mist that neither of them had the tools, or perhaps the will, to penetrate. Once it grew too uncomfortable, Cas sighed heavily and stood.

He eyed the ladder up to the top bunk rather suspiciously, but shrugged off his trench coat and suit jacket, hanging them on the corner of the bed frame. Toeing off his boots, he slid them neatly into the corner and disappeared up the ladder.

Dean tried to refocus on the police reports Sam had pulled the night before, giving a deep read to the autopsy reports of all the victims. Something was—

_Creak, creak._

Something about the way they phrased the damage to the bodies was—

_Creaaaaak, creak, boooing!_

“Cas! What the hell are you doing up there?”

Silence. Dean refocused on the reports. The most recent body had the most in-depth report, Luke Hutch’s injuries being still fresh and much easier to document than the older corpses that had been found the week before. But even in the lengthier report, they didn’t mention—

_Creak!_

“Jesus Christ, Cas! Can’t you stay still?”

“I’m sorry,” came Castiel’s petulant, sarcastic response from overhead. “It’s not very comfortable up here.”

Dean’s left hand came up to his brow, squeezing and rubbing down across his face in exasperation. “Never mind. Just—come down here a sec, will you? I want you to look at something.”

The bunk bed frame made a series of genuinely heinous noises, and Cas’s socked feet appeared, dangling over the edge by the ladder. To Dean’s amusement, the feet wiggled almost childishly before Cas jumped down, forgoing the small metal ladder entirely.

Cas looked tired and severely rumpled—far more so even than usual—as he glared at Dean. “What?”

Dean shuffled to the side, making space next to him on the mattress as he pointed to the laptop screen. “Take a look at these reports, Cas. Notice anything?”

“What am I supposed to be noticing?” Cas asked wearily, pulling the computer over onto his lap as he settled his back against the wall next to Dean, slowly thawing from their earlier strain.

“Just pay attention to the parts about the damage to the bodies,” Dean suggested.

A few quiet minutes passed, the tension still sitting in the inches between them but at least partly abated.

“They—None of them have been eaten,” Cas spoke suddenly.

Dean nodded. “They weren’t mauled, or bitten, or nibbled in any way. Wendigo are cannibals.”

“These people,” Cas noted, his thick finger hovering over a particular line of text, “they weren’t food. They had been impaled on the branches of trees, high above the ground, while still alive, then left to die slowly. But never eaten.” His voice was flat with displeasure and disapproval, but otherwise, he was clinical. “Perhaps this _isn’t_ a wendigo, after all,” he mused.

Dean slowly agreed. “That’s what I was thinking.”

The tan skin between Castiel’s eyebrows pulled together in a knot. “But this doesn’t fit the profile of any other beast that I know of, either. So, what are we hunting?”

“All we really know, I guess, is that whatever it is, it isn’t human.”

“How can you be sure?”

“They were all found at least twenty feet off the floor, Cas. Lifting a two-hundred-pound dude up that high, to impale him on a tree branch, while he was still alive…that ain’t easy, lemme tell you.”

Cas raised an eyebrow. “Why does it sound like you’re speaking from experience?”

“I’m not, not precisely, but I’ve seen and done plenty of other weird shit.”

Cas gave a tiny hum of agreement, before slipping the laptop off of his thighs and back onto Dean’s. They sat in silence once more. When it stretched on, verging on awkward, Cas slowly pushed off the wall and began to shuffle off the bed, obviously intending to return to his creaky bunk.

“Wait—” Dean quickly reached forward, grabbing at Cas’s white shirt sleeve as he sat with his legs over the edge of the mattress. “I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes focused on the keyboard in front of him.

Cas tilted his head left, crystal-clear blue eyes drilling holes in Dean’s skull for a long moment. Then, slowly, he slid back on the bed, until he was seated beside Dean once more, a little less of an obvious gap between them this time.

“I’m sorry too, Dean. Whatever I did, I don’t even know, but I didn’t mean it, whatever it was.”

“You didn’t do anything, Cas, really,” Dean sighed, bringing his thumb and forefinger up to rub at his eyes, head bowed. “Everything was my fault; I’m the one who—” Dean stumbled. “If I hadn’t sent you away, then—”

One strong hand came up from Cas’s side, reaching to rest on Dean’s forearm. “Stop. Don’t do that. You made the best choice you could, at the time.”

Dean’s eyes closed, and his head remained bowed as Cas spoke.

“I don’t hold any ill-will against you, Dean. You shouldn’t either. We’ve all made decisions we regret. Unfortunately, that’s just our lives.”

When Dean still didn’t move, Cas shuffled a couple of inches closer, leaning back against the wall once more, pressed up to Dean’s side. He reached across and pulled the laptop over so that it straddled both of their laps, occupying one of his thighs and one of Dean’s.

“Come on,” Cas said softly. “Let’s look at the witness interviews and see if any of them jump out as worth a second look,” he suggested.

Dean nodded, mute, and refocused on the screen. 

 

Complaining about the temperature back at Birch Beach had been a mistake, Dean decided. Clearly, he had tempted fate because as far as he was concerned, Angle Inlet felt like the friggin’ north pole.

“We’re gonna freeze to death on a wendigo hunt,” Kevin said, his near-constant grumbling peaking as he double checked the map in the back of the car.

“People camp in the snow all the time, Kevin,” Sam said with a heavy sigh. Even he was reaching his whiny-prophet limit. “It’s actually exciting that we get to use all this gear the Men of Letters had in the bunker. We sure as hell aren’t ever going to get to use it in Kansas.”

Dean’s nose crinkled. “Jesus, Sam…are you actually looking forward to this? That’s taking outdoorsy to a new level, you know.”

Sam looked at him from the passenger seat, and Dean could see him slowly biting back a bitchy response and shoving it down. He was trying. They both were. “Cold-weather camping can be fun, as long as you’re sensible and safe about it,” he offered carefully after a moment. “I just think that as we’re here, we might as well try to enjoy it.”

Appreciating the effort, Dean offered Sam an uncertain smile. “Well, I’m not really into the whole camping thing, but I do think we all need this trip to get our heads back where they should be. So, I’m not gonna argue against it, cold or no. Just make sure we’ve got the baggie of marshmallows and graham crackers,” he grinned, wiggling his eyebrows.

“Smores?” Kevin piped up from the back again. “Now that, I could actually be down with.”

“Fine,” Sam sighed. “But you’re carrying it, Dean.”

Easing Baby along the last mile or so of passable terrain, the group fell silent. The roads around them diverged into worn trails passing over flat plains and gently undulating hills, covered with grass that seemed far too green against the whiteness of the slowly melting lumps of snow that dotted the ground. The emerald blades peeked up desperately, grasping at the last few days of sunlight they would likely see until April.

Giant trees, ranging from gangly pines to spruce, tamarack, and paper birch trees, mocked them from a great distance. It was going to be hard work to find whatever secrets they hid. There were no signs of life as the Impala purred along in the cold, but Dean knew it was out there. Northwest Angle State Forest was mostly tribal lands, and he had done enough reading on the Red Lake Nation to know that in the remote communities scattered amid the wilderness, black bears were common, along with the entire food chain of beasties that supported them.

Feeling somewhat reassured by the sturdy shotgun he knew was in the trunk, Dean pulled Baby over into a rest area at the side of the road.

“This looks to be about as far as we’re going to be able to take the car,” he noted, turning in his seat to face Sam, Cas, and Kevin. “State law doesn’t allow any motorized vehicles into the area at all. But, as long as we stick to the open paths and trails and it doesn’t start snowing, we should be pretty good.”

Sam nodded, consulting his phone. “No snow on the horizon just yet, according to the web. We should be able to skirt the forest, find the Red Lake community out near the crime scene, and then find the trees the bodies were suspended on and go from there.”

Cas had been silent most of the morning. He looked odd, to Dean’s eyes, his usual trench coat and sensible shoes wisely swapped out for a warm jacket and hiking boots. He wasn’t anywhere near recovered from regaining his grace, Dean recalled as he turned to look at him, and the cold seemed to be beginning to get to even him.

“How do you think those angel senses will hold up against black bears, Cas?” he asked with a little grin.

“I’m sure I’ll hear them coming, Dean,” he answered solemnly. “So, be nice to me if you actually want any forewarning.”

Kevin snickered, and the four men passed around a small smile before reaching for their door handles.

Dean leaned against Baby for a moment, looking out over the wild landscape ahead. The green and white checkerboard of the rocky fields and the towering trees beyond was breathtakingly beautiful. If he’d been the outdoorsy type, this would have been the hike of a lifetime, most likely. Dean still couldn’t shake the feeling that this whole idea was a terrible mistake, but at least for now, it wasn’t looking so bad.


	2. Chapter 2

Three hours or so in, Dean stopped walking and turned to look back at the others; three colorful figures appearing insignificant among the misty vastness of the icy landscape they meandered across. They had spread apart along an uphill trail of flat gray rock, smoothed like a footpath by the retreating glaciers a few million years before. Every set of shoulders on his friends was hunched; every head was bowed to observe the monotony of one foot before the other.

In hindsight, only he was fit enough for the two-day hike. Sam was still worn from Gadreel’s exit, though much recovered from the trials themselves. Castiel was weak, angelic once more, but weak. Kevin was physically well, the damage from Gadreel’s attack all but vanished under Cas’s care, but mentally, he was a mess. They were all carrying too much weight, and the blisters on the heels of Dean’s feet were already raw.

Through their discomforts, Sam, Kevin, and Cas were missing everything of interest: the sudden burst of an animal through the snow, the faces created by the rock formations, the perfect frozen ponds, and the curious guide symbols left here and there by the native tribe whose lands they were heading toward. Sam would have gobbled up such a thing, usually. But, weary, his head hung, unseeing.

“Let’s take a break, guys,” Dean called back to the other three. Cas looked up, and Dean beckoned with his head for him to catch up to where he was.

Dean eased his pack off of his back, sat down, and opened the clip that held it shut, delving inside for the map he’d wisely tucked within to keep dry. His back was aching from ambling, at the pace set by Sam and Kevin. Cas was weary, no doubt, but he could go faster than those two. Dean could feel his irritation evolving into irrational anger, manifesting in a tightening across his chest; it seemed to buzz behind his teeth too, as if his jaws were clamping down on the hot monologue of curses he wished to rain down upon the two men who were turning this hunt into what now felt like a death march.

“What’s wrong?” Cas asked, squinting through the fine drizzle. It settled onto his tan skin, making his face shiny even beneath his furred hood. He panted a little from the brief powerwalk to catch up, Dean noted, tiny puffs of whiteness bursting past his lips as he came to stand beside Dean.

“We gotta take a break, man. Sam and Kevin can’t keep up like usual.”

“I’m not sure Kevin is ever quite at the fitness level of yourself and your brother,” Cas observed. “But in their defense, this time, I am not much faster.”

“That’s…your fine.” Dean clenched his jaw again, fighting the buzzing in his teeth, keeping the strings of words he battled with inside where they belonged. What had happened to Cas was not his fault. None of this was anyone’s fault. Cas’s slowness and weakness weren’t a cause of irritation to Dean so much as they were a cause of guilt and shame. Sam and Kevin, on the other hand, were unappreciative, Dean felt. He’d been between a rock and a hard place; he wasn’t about to lose his brother. Gadreel had been a poor decision, but the only one he could make. Sam would come around.

But couldn’t he come around a little faster?

Dean lowered himself to a smooth rock at the edge of the trail, spreading the map across his legs while he waited for Sam and Kevin to stroll their way slowly toward them.

“What now?” Sam asked testily as he arrived.

“This isn’t working,” Dean snapped in return. “You’re all acting like we’re at a funeral.”

“This is my surprised face,” Kevin said, deadpan. “A winter hike in northern Minnesota, that’s what your asking of us. A weakened angel, a hunter who is barely talking to you, and me. A math nerd. Why on Earth did you think this hunt was going to work out, Dean? You should have called someone else.”

Dean struggled valiantly to keep his jaw closed. He was losing the fight when he felt Cas’s hand clasp at his shoulder.

“Kevin,” Cas cautioned quietly. “Not everything that happened was Dean’s fault. None of us are blameless in where we are now. And the fact remains that people are dying, out there in the woods, and it is our responsibility to find out why. The trip will be good for all of us, to try and move past our stresses.”

Cas didn’t sound remotely convinced by his own words, but Dean appreciated his backup, nonetheless.

There were nods and mumbles, and Dean looked up again in time to catch both Sam and Kevin looking a little guilty. He turned his eyes across to Cas, their shared gaze lingering for a just a moment as Dean gave him a small, grateful smile.

With fewer grumbles, the small group pushed on. Dean slowed his pace a little this time, still ahead with Cas, then Kevin and Sam following on behind, but closer than they had been. By the middle of the morning, the ice from the night before was growing slushy and slippery in places, and it seemed like the wildlife of the area was venturing out to grab the last of the sunlight and foraging time before winter. Squirrels scattered, birds sang, the occasional rabbit flurried through the remaining snow, and even an elk dashed across their path.

Things were starting to feel better.

Dean moved steadily, keeping to the main trail that led around the edge of the Northwest Angle State forest itself, the tree line to their left as they moved northwards. The path was rocky and had worn stretches that were little more than smooth gray stone, before turning back into thick grass and tree roots. The further they got from the town of Angle Inlet, the more erratic the trail became. There wasn’t another hiker in sight, which given the time of year and the temperature, merely indicated that most people had more sense than they did.

Dean’s back ached, the big hiking backpack that he carried severely over-weighted between snow-camping gear and hunting gear. Cas had insisted on carrying the ammo and the tents themselves, but there had been more than enough weight to go around, nonetheless.

They’d been moving for another thirty minutes or so when it happened.

The forest to their left seemed to stretch on forever, looking almost eternally the same. Dean reached back, twisting his arm to reach the side pocket of his large expedition pack without taking it off. Pulling out the map, he continued walking as he unfurled it. The path was uphill and icy, and as Dean studied the edge of the forest on the map to try and work out their exact position from the nearby landmarks, his foot slid. His leg went out to the side and overextended, his other foot unable to find enough purchase on the ice to keep him on his feet.

Searing, snapping pain shot through his knee, and before Dean had time to register what had happened, he was on his face in the slushy snow, sliding a few feet feebly back down the incline. His hood, and the sound of crunching ice and snow as he tumbled muffled everything, and for a minute the world was a series of flashes of the light-gray sky and dark, wet ground as he rolled.

“Son of a—” Dean’s exclamation fell away into a wordless, agonized yell as he settled on his front in the snow. He was wet, cold, and embarrassed; but none of that registered, dulled by the throbbing agony of his knee.

Hands gripped his shoulders, and Dean was turned onto his back in the snow, Cas’s concerned blue eyes peering down at him. Cas’s hood was pushed back, the fur-lining bunched around his neck as he crouched down on the slippery rock.

“Dean?” Cas raised a hand, cautioning him to stay still for just a moment.

The angel’s dark hair was silhouetted against the pale, clouded sky, and for a moment as Dean squinted up at him, it looked almost as if his savior had a halo. He’d have smirked if he wasn’t in so much pain.

“Oof,” said Dean.

He was too breathless to do more than exhale or groan as Cas helped up him to a sitting position.

“What hurts?” Cas squinted in concern.

Behind him, Sam and Kevin hurried up the path.

“Dean!” Sam called from a few feet away, concern cutting through all of his recent frostiness. “What happened?”

Slowly, with Cas’s arm looped across his back under his arms, Dean stood, keeping the weight off his left leg.

“I was looking at the map and my foot just… slid, I guess. Overextended my knee. Hurts like a bitch,” Dean admitted, hissing through his teeth and leaning onto Cas.

Cas took his weight and led him, hopping, to the side of the trail. Removing Dean’s backpack for him, he helped him lean onto the trunk of a nearby pine.

“Looked like a hell of a fall,” said Kevin, helpfully.

Dean grunted in agreement, still a little out of breath.

“You’re in a lot of pain,” Cas observed. “Here, let me—”

“No!” Dean snapped, raising his hand to bat away the two fingers Cas was already raising toward him. “No mojoing, Cas. You’re not up to full strength.”

Cas frowned deeply, and Sam joined him.

“At least let him see what’s wrong then, Dean,” Sam said. “If it’s anything serious, you should let him heal you.”

Cas didn’t wait for Dean’s permission before gently cupping his hands around Dean’s knee as he leaned over, earning another hiss from Dean despite the softness of the touch.

“You’ve torn all the ligaments on the inside of your knee,” Cas said clinically.

Sam and Kevin both grimaced, but Cas and Dean were busy glaring at each other.

“I’ll be fine,” Dean insisted.

“This is ridiculous. You’re in a lot of pain, and this won’t heal quickly, I could just—”

“No.”

“Dean—”

“Drop it okay!” Dean snapped, angrily.

With an irritated growling noise that sounded more animal than man, Cas stepped back from Dean. He turned, walking away from him and back to the center of the trail, but not before Dean caught the angry clench of his teeth and the furious darkening of his eyes.

Dean set his jaw obstinately. Cas was still weak, recovering. He was sleeping, eating — no way Dean was letting him use his grace on something so wasteful.

Sam and Kevin exchanged awkward glances before they came forward to help Dean up to standing once more.

“Can you put weight on it?” Sam asked quietly, guiding Dean around the discarded hiking bag on the floor.

Dean tested it, gulping down the scream that threatened and forcing out a nod instead. “Sure. Just…let’s see if there’s a branch or anything, something I can lean on, like a cane.”

Kevin took the prompt and scurried off toward the trees. “I’ll see what I can find.”

Sam exhaled slowly. “You’re sure?” he asked, eyeing Dean distrustfully. “I know you don’t want to—”

“Really, Sam, I’ll be fine. I’ll try to carry on with a stick, and if it gets worse, we can stop and strap it up or something, okay?”

Sam nodded slowly. “Okay, dude. If that’s what you want, I’ve got painkillers?” he offered, gesturing to his backpack.

Dean nodded. “Sure. Thanks.”

Sam left Dean to stand awkwardly on one leg while he removed his pack, unclipping the fabric flap that covered the top and beginning to root around.

Dean balanced for a moment, fighting back the tears. Without a word, an arm slid around his waist. Cas didn’t look at him; his eyes fixed firmly on the slushy floor as he supported Dean, pulling him close to his side. Dean wasn’t even sure when he’d approached, after yelling at him a moment ago. All he knew was that, as usual, he now felt like a dick. Cas, though, was gentle and slow, giving Dean space to push away if he wanted, it seemed.

“Thanks,” Dean murmured, biting back anything else that would have fallen off his tongue. He let his weight loll to the left, leaning into Cas and keeping his injured leg entirely off the ground. As his anger dissipated and the pain in his knee began to settle, Dean felt his heart sinking familiarly. “Sorry,” he spoke up after a moment, though it was barely more than a whisper. “I’m an asshole.”

For a moment, Cas thoroughly looked like he was about to agree, but instead, he said nothing, merely shaking his head and looking out over the forest beside them.

Dean sighed. He wanted to say something more, to try and make Cas understand that he didn’t deserve his help, but he was spared from further conversation by Kevin’s reappearance.

“Here you go,” Kevin announced proudly, bringing a stout stick with him out of the tree line. “If we can cut the twigs off, this will work. They’re too thick to snap off but if we get a knife—”

Silently, Cas held out a hand for the branch. Kevin passed it over, raising an eyebrow in question. Without responding or even changing his expression from the distant, grumpy look he was sporting, Cas took the branch in one hand. With a sharp cracking sound, Cas pulled the twigs and smaller branches off it with one swift slide of his curled fist, effectively peeling the wood with the tunnel of his hand. Left with a relatively smooth stick, he passed it wordlessly to Dean, before turning on his heel and heading off up the trail.

Quiet tension settling back over them all, Dean, Sam, and Kevin followed.

The weak sun was creeping higher in the sky by the time Sam’s voice drifted up the trail.

“Let’s catch a break, guys, yeah?”

Dean turned his eyes up to the heavens briefly, grateful though he’d never have said anything. His hand was growing sore from the branch, his shoulders ached from the odd walking angle he now had to maintain, and he could feel his knee beginning to swell within the leg of his jeans. Tears pricked at his eyes whenever he tried to put weight on it, though he was doing his best not to let anyone see.

As the group came to a halt on a bend in the path, Dean shuffled to a series of large boulders. They were worn smooth, deposited here by glaciers hundreds of thousands of years ago most likely, and formed a small clump almost like a table and set of chairs. Dean slid his butt back onto one of the lower ones with a sigh of relief, leaning his elbow onto one of the taller.

“Dean isn’t going to make it if we take this route,” Cas said to Sam over his head.

“Hey—” Dean began, scowling, but Sam spoke over him as if he wasn’t even there.

“You’re right. And he’s never going to admit it, either, so let’s see if we can find a quicker route,” Sam suggested, reaching down to where Dean sat and raiding his backpack for the map.

Kevin moved up to the rocks, joining in. “We should have reached the Red Lake community by tomorrow morning, but at this rate now, we’d be lucky if it took two days.”

Dean was about to protest until he registered that the voices were laced with concern, rather than annoyance. Instead, he huffed out a sigh. “I’m sorry,” he offered quietly.

Sam and Kevin both looked down at him, before Sam waved dismissively with his free hand, moving toward the more prominent boulder with the map in his other. “It’s not your fault, Dean. It happens. We wanted to stick to the trails, so we didn’t get lost, but we can cut half a day off the trip if we cut through the forest, I bet.”

Spreading the map out on the boulder, Sam, Cas, and Kevin leaned in.

Somewhat embarrassed, Dean twisted his upper body so he could see too. Sam trailed his finger from the trail they were on, straight through Northwest Angle forest to the remote Red Lake Nation spot where they were headed. Around him, Kevin and Cas were nodding.

“I can make it,” Dean protested.

“We know,” Cas said, kinder than Dean deserved. “But it’ll be faster if we cut through the forest.”

“Unless you want to turn back,” Kevin pointed out, in a tone that indicated he knew Dean wouldn’t.

Sam nodded his agreement. “We don’t have the supplies to be adding extra days onto our trip,” he said. “It was just an accident, Dean,” he said, holding up a hand before Dean could splutter out much offense, “but as you keep saying, people are dying out there. We can’t just keep going at this pace. You’re even slower than me now.”

Dean pouted and scowled.

Cas patted Dean gently on the shoulder. “Come on, Dean,” he said. “It’s just a change of course. If you won’t let me heal you, at least agree to that.” He sounded somewhat defeated.

Dean looked up, trying to catch Cas’s eye and work out his odd tone, but the angel wouldn’t look at him. So instead, he nodded. “Fine, if you guys think that’s best; that’s what we’ll do.”

Sam gave a slight smile. “Thanks, Dean.”

“For?” Dean raised an eyebrow.

“Not being an asshole, for once,” Sam quipped, though there was an edge of truth to it that neither of them could ignore.

Kevin snorted, reaching to fold the map back up. “Alright, you guys. Group hug, or something. Keep the family drama on a low level, because I don’t want to live an episode of _Maury._ ”

Dean eyed him flatly. “Shut it, kid. You’re part of our family drama, like it or not.”

“Ugh,” Kevin made an exasperated noise but struggled to hide his little grin as Sam mockingly bear-hugged him from the side.

Cas watched with barely concealed amusement as Kevin tried to wiggle free. He cleared his throat, offering a hand to Dean to pull him up off the rock. “We’d better get a move on. Even if we cut through the forest, we need to press on if we’re going to make it before sundown.”

Settling his makeshift walking stick into his hand once more, Dean turned and eyed the trees ahead of them. The thick wall of pine, spruce and tamarack disappeared down as far as the eye could see. If they got lost, they’d be in real trouble.

As if reading his thoughts, Cas stepped up quietly beside him. “My sense of direction is still quite good,” he offered. “Even as weak as I am.”

Dean’s stomach soured at the mere mention. “Yeah, well. Let’s make sure we have good solid compass bearings, just in case.”

Sam dug their electronic compass out from the front of Kevin’s pack, and they huddled around, triple-checking their bearings before they left the path. They were all working together, Dean realized. In sync, even if it wasn’t in the best circumstances. Dean’s knee might have felt like it was on fire, but for the first time in weeks, his mood had improved a few notches.

 

As the group moved into the forest, an odd stillness fell around them. The light that filtered down through the many branches overhead had a strange, gray quality to it that made it difficult to guess what time it actually was or how long they’d been walking. Everything was quiet, and the deeper they moved into the trees, the darker the sky overhead got.

“You said no snow, right?” Dean called ahead to Sam, pausing to yank his walking stick out of some overgrowth he’d failed to avoid, hidden as it was by a soft snow drift.

“Yes, Dean,” Sam called back testily. “I checked three times. It’s not going to snow.”

“Alright,” Dean grumbled, still loud enough for Sam to hear as he walked ahead. “Just checkin’. Because it looks like snow.”

“I am perfectly capable of checking a weather website, Dean,” Sam groused. “Though I’m sure it’s a surprise to you, I can actually do things without your oversight.”

Dean bit down on the flesh of his inner cheek, willing himself not to say anything back. So much for his improving mood. He wasn’t trying to override Sam, or belittle him, or make decisions for him. He really wasn’t. Couldn’t Sam see he’d had no choice with Gadreel?

His shoulders tensing again from frustration and exertion, Dean’s steps became more uneven, his pained, lurching strides making wet, slushing noises as he moved through the muck and sludge that had accumulated under the trees.

Cas stepped up next to him from behind, observing Dean’s legs critically. “Dean, I really think—”

“No,” Dean stated quietly, keeping his eyes ahead.

Sighing, Cas dropped back behind him, and they resumed their march through the forest.

They walked in silence for another mile, Kevin striding ahead and muttering about the intense cold, followed by Sam, silent and brooding. Dean came next, and he could hear Cas behind him. The back of Dean’s neck prickled as if Cas was watching his every step. Dean refused to look back and check. The branch Dean was using for extra support on his swiftly-swelling knee dug deep into the snow and mud, and he had to wiggle it back out of the ground with every shuffling step. Progress was slow.

Dean was lost in thought, still frustrated that Cas couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to be healed. Did he really have no care about himself at all? Didn’t he know how weak he was, how low on power? Didn’t he know Dean wanted him to get better?

The gray atmosphere pressed in, the endless yards of spiky trees growing higher as they moved deeper into the forest. The air grew somehow thicker and more frigid. The smell of the pines and the ice tickled Dean’s nose with a freshness that bordered on unpleasant.

Eventually, even Kevin stopped complaining, and they hiked in silence.

Puffs of white, frosty breath from each of them were the only sign of life Dean could pick up; not a rabbit, not a deer, not a bird. It was eerie.

Dean shook himself, refusing to get spooked out by a damn forest, of all things.

Cas heard it first, of course, his angelic hearing ten times better than Dean’s, even weak as he was.

“What’s that?” he called softly up to Dean, just loud enough for the two of them to hear.

“What’s what?” Dean couldn’t hear anything, but he’d been around Cas long enough not to question his senses.

“Buzzing,” Cas said shortly.

“What kind—”

Kevin’s scream cut right through Dean’s question. _“WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!”_

Gritting his teeth, Dean braced himself against the shooting pain in his leg and hurried ahead. Sam had Kevin under his arm, bracing him while he retched violently off the side of the not-trail they were following.

“Alright, Kevin, just calm down. It’s probably just hunters or something. Bait.” Sam comforted him, his voice easily giving away the fact that he was lying through his teeth.

“Hunters? You pull that out of your ass fresh, Sam?” Kevin bit back, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “I almost walked into it!”

Confused, Dean and Cas moved on past them, trying to see what exactly the kid had found.

Dean stumbled when he saw it.

Immediately, Cas’s hand came up under his bicep to steady him. He didn’t even protest. The two of them just stood silently, open-mouthed as they gazed up at the horror in the trees.

It was splayed out, gutted, dripping, festering.

High above them, higher than a man could reach, or a bear would bother.

It buzzed with flies, guts hanging, tongue swollen.

“Is that…” Dean trailed off.

“An elk, I think,” Cas offered quietly. “Was.”

It was splayed open like a macabre autopsy, everything that should be within hanging entirely without, its eyes crazed and rolled back. It was stretched out like a banner, like a flag with a simple meaning: Don’t go here. Turn back.

No longer caring about his previous bad mood, Dean allowed himself to lean onto Cas a little. Cas took the opening, sliding his hand low onto Dean’s back and moved silently, supported him as they moved back to where Sam and Kevin waited.

“Did you see it?” Kevin questioned them as they returned, his metal water flask in hand. He rinsed his mouth, spitting into the ferns that surrounded his feet, their curling leaves bowed down heavy with old, frozen snow.

“Yeah.” Dean grimaced.

Cas exchanged a look with Dean, before turning to Kevin. “I’m sure Sam is right. Hunters, perhaps. Bait.”

Cas was lying, Dean could tell. Sam and Kevin either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

The addition of, “Or whatever we are hunting,” seemed entirely unnecessary for everyone.

Kevin screwed the cap back onto his water bottle. Sam took it from him, moving around behind him to helpfully tuck it back into the side-pocket of Kevin’s pack. They were all quiet for a moment, just slowly calming.

Dean could feel the weight of Cas’s hand still at his back, and it was comforting. When they all fell quiet, Cas seemed to realize that he hadn’t moved and that Dean no longer required his support, now that he wasn’t walking. Blinking with what might have been embarrassment, he stepped back from Dean suddenly, his hand sliding from Dean’s coat without so much as rustling the fabric. Dean looked over and their eyes caught for just a moment; green and blue, the brightest colors in the entire dull, gray forest. Dean’s back felt even colder as Cas’s hand moved away.

 

The trail they had begun on was two hours behind them when Sam raised an arm, drawing them all to a halt.

“I’m sorry, guys,” he said quietly, lowering his eyes down and refusing to meet Dean’s inquiring gaze. “I need to stop for a bit.”

Dean observed the sticky, ghost-like pallor of Sam’s face, his cheeks more hollow than usual, the bags under his eyes more heavily pronounced. For all his protests that he was fine, Sam wasn’t fully recovered from the Trials, let alone from Gadreel, and it still showed. He dripped with sweat, beads of it clinging to his eyebrows, smearing across his pale skin as he swiped the back of his hand across his face.

“Yeah,” Dean said guiltily. “Let’s, uh, get some lunch.” He dropped his gaze, unable to look at Sam anymore.

They shuffled around in silence, dropping packs and finding a dry-ish patch of ground to spread one of the tent tarps over so that they could sit on something that wasn’t sticky, brown snow while they ate. Dean leaned back against the trunk of a stout spruce, pushing his bad leg out in front of him as he lowered himself to the ground. He’d done his best not to draw attention to the pain he was in, but as Dean winced, slowly extending the leg flat onto the tarp, he could feel Cas’s gaze on him.

Cas didn’t offer to heal him again. Instead, he dug around in the pile of packs, bringing out one of the packages of sandwiches they’d picked up from the small store at Angle Inlet that morning. For emergencies, they had plenty of dried food and emergency calorie bars, but at least for the first couple of days, sandwiches, dried noodles, and other light, compact meals were the way to go. Bringing the ham and cheese sandwich over to Dean, Cas lowered himself down next to him in silence.

“Thanks,” Dean said quietly, taking the offered food without complaint. He plopped the package down into his lap and began to unwrap it, his eyes still on Sam. His brother looked tired, but he seemed to be recovering quickly as they rested. Dean made a note to have them rest more often.

“You need to rest too,” Cas pointed out quietly.

“How do you do that?” Dean frowned, slightly irritated.

“Do what?”

“Say stuff like you know what I’m thinking. Using your angel skills to creep around inside my head?”

Dean expected an angry rebuke from Cas, but what he got instead was a surprisingly soft smile, though it was determinedly directed down the ground, rather than at Dean.

“No, Dean. I could do that, I suppose. But I haven’t and won’t. I don’t need to see inside your head to tell what you’re thinking. I just know you pretty well, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Oh.” Dean felt his cheeks heat slightly, and he dropped his eyes to the sandwich in his lap, keeping them firmly there. He felt Cas tense slightly next to him. Dean reached across, placing a hand very briefly on Cas’s knee, just long enough to give it a reassuring squeeze. “Well, that’s true, I guess. Other than Sam, no one knows me as well as you do.”

Cas relaxed again at the brief touch. “You do the same, you know. In your own way,” he said. Dean could hear the tiny smirk in his voice without looking up to confirm it.

Taking a bite of the ham and cheese, Dean chewed thoughtfully for a moment, before turning to look at Cas. The angel still had the hood of his parka up, and Dean could only make out his eyes and nose. “How do you mean?”

Cas turned enough to focus entirely on Dean. Somehow, with both of their hoods up, their gazes concealed within, it felt like a private moment. “I’m not the most expressive, I’ve been told. But you pick up on how I’m feeling, or what I’m thinking, long before anyone else ever does,” Cas said, shrugging one shoulder. “You have for a long time.”

Dean’s smile was private, blocked from Sam and Kevin on the other side of the tarp by the fur of his hood. “Yeah, I guess that’s right. I know you pretty well too, Cas,” he gently mimicked.

Cas returned his smile, and their eyes caught, as they always had. It was like a magnet between them, this _thing_ they had never addressed, even before Dean had messed up and let Cas down, sending him away from the bunker. Casting them out of their lives, only to call him back when, as usual, they needed something from him. The likelihood of addressing it now, after doing that, seemed laughable.

Suddenly the ham and cheese tasted bitter.

“Ugh, would you two quit it?” Kevin whined.

Dean blinked. “Quit what?” he asked, turning his head to look at the skinny Asian kid, who was so wrapped in clothing he seemed to be hiking in the Arctic circle, rather than Minnesota.

“The staring,” Sam and Kevin announced at the same time.

“It’s annoying” Sam added.

“It’s gross,” Kevin finished.

Dean felt his cheeks heat ferociously. He looked over, catching a displeased squint on Cas’s face as he looked at Kevin before the angel cleared it away. Neither of them said anything, Cas tilting his head back on the thick trunk of the tree and gazing thoughtfully upwards, and Dean returns to his sandwich.

Out of the corner of his eye, Dean saw Sam and Kevin exchange a smirk. Assholes.

Beside Dean, Cas suddenly stiffened once more.

“Cas?”

Slowly, Cas pointed upwards. “Look.” He was pointing slightly awkwardly to the trunk of the tree they both rested against, far above their heads.

Dean’s eyesight was definitely not as good as Cas’s, and he had to shuffle forward slightly to angle his head up to look at the trunk, grunting in discomfort as he moved his leg. Up above, at least twelve feet from the ground, there was something carved into the bark of the massive spruce.

“Is that…” Kevin’s voice quivered uncertainly from behind them, as everyone’s attention had been drawn to where Cas and Dean both stared.

“A rune,” Sam said. “It looks Nordic, I think?” He stood, pushing down on the navy plastic tarp to unfold himself up to his full height, getting a closer look. “Do you know it, Cas?”

“Yes.” Cas nodded, agreeing with Sam’s assessment. “It’s a letter, one of the Elder Futhark, a Viking alphabet. Its name is ‘Thurisaz’."

“But…” Kevin joined in again, his voice trailing quietly between words. “Viking runes weren’t just letters, right? They had… meanings. Like, one by itself like that… it’s saying something.”

“Yes,” Cas admitted quietly. “It means something.”

“What does it mean, Cas?” Dean asked impatiently. “What’s this fluffdark thing telling us?”

“Futhark,” Cas corrected distractedly, still staring at the tree. “It’s a letter from the Elder Futhark, and it has three meanings. ‘Giant’, ‘anguish’, or ‘danger’.” He sighed, finally lowering his gaze back down. “Take your pick; I suppose.”

“Danger,” said Kevin flatly. “This is us. Of course, it means fucking danger.”

No one argued.

 

They were a quiet, somber group again. After their lunch, they had walked for several more hours before they stopped for a very tense break. They picked up their pace again, pushing onwards. Their compasses and map told them that they were heading in the right direction, but their eyes and senses couldn’t see any approaching signs of civilization.

Dean had far too much time with his own thoughts, which was never healthy, and between his sore leg and everyone else’s general weariness as the hours wore on, the mood between them all fell foul and thick again.

As the light that filtered through the skyscraper-like trees became hazier and dimmer, tiny, dazzling diamonds of snow began to drift down on puffs of air, lazy and silent.

“Thought you said no snow,” Dean called ahead to Sam.

“I Googled. It said no snow.” Sam sounded deeply irritated, though Dean wasn’t sure anymore whether it was just with him or the situation in general.

The trees seemed to close in on them as the sky grew grayer, and the group closed in with them. Cas walked at Deans side, Sam and Kevin only steps ahead, rather than spread out as they had been all day. Dean could almost feel Cas’s gaze boring into him as he stumbled and hobbled through the mud, slush, and increasing snow; so he kept his eyes ahead, refusing to acknowledge it and go through the same fight again.

The snow began in earnest.

Jewels of white decorating the air turned into wet, pelting flakes that clung to everything they touched. Picturesque little flurries became a fresh layer of white on each bank, branch, and trail. The trails they followed by then were not the manmade kind, but those cut by feet much smaller and wilder than their own; they relied on their compasses instead, doing what they could to hurry and get Dean—or by then, all of them—somewhere flat, warm, and restful.

The snow carried on.

“It’s getting heavier,” Kevin noted, his breath puffing out in a gentle, rising cloud through the increasing flakes.

“It will be dark soon, too,” Cas said. He sounded tired, and when Dean finally chanced a look over at him, he found Cas’s face downturned toward the sludgy trail, merely following Sam’s heels as he stepped on in front.

“We should be there by now,” Dean acknowledged, saying the thing that none of them had dared voice.

“Yeah.” Sam was solemn, even as he reached up to bat some snowflakes from his nose. “But according to our compasses, we’re not lost. We’re on track. None of us are _that_ bad at map reading, even Kevin.”

“My sense of direction should be exact,” Cas said, not looking up. “But I’m afraid I’m not going to be much help, again. My senses seem… dulled. Perhaps I need to rest some more.”

Their feet maintained a clunking beat against the forest floor as they all struggled on.

As it fell in thicker sheets, the snow hemmed in their senses, muting even the small sounds they’d grown used to until there was nothing but the soft whistle of the wind and the endless creak of the towering trees. It was getting darker, the light losing its magical, timeless quality and becoming oppressive.

“We’ve gotta find somewhere to stop,” Sam called back over his shoulder, raising his voice through the growing flurries even though he was no more than a couple of feet ahead. “The weather isn’t getting any better, the daylight isn’t going to hold out much longer, and we’re in no state to be hiking at night.”         

Dean nodded, his parka hood flopping slightly around his face. “Yeah. We need to find a place to get the tents up before it gets any worse. First flat place we see.”

“We should hurry,” Cas added.

Kevin was silent, sulking, but he moved right along with them when they began to pick up the pace.

Dean could feel his knee stiffening through the awkward movements and exertion of the day, but with nothing else to be done, he merely ground down on his teeth and pushed on. After another couple of hundred yards, Cas’s hand touched briefly to his back. He didn’t say anything, just looked, offering Dean support and assistance without even a word wasted, given how versed they were in each other’s eyes.

Dean shook his head. He’d be fine. He didn’t need to rely on Cas. Cas couldn’t always save him… shouldn’t need to.

Castiel frowned, but his expression was more concern than anger, and for that Dean was grateful. It was a change, not a perfect one, but a welcome one for them all. All four of them had spent so much time angry in the last few weeks; it was good to have common enemies that weren’t each other; even if those enemies were currently cold, exhaustion, and snow.

A crack of thunder overhead pressed them on even further, something frantic appearing in the way they were all straining now, pushing through the snow.

“Is it thunder-snowing?’ Kevin called over the increasing wind. “Is that even a thing?”

“Yes. It’s a thing.” Cas snapped, though what Kevin had done to annoy him was anyone’s guess.

A veritable blizzard was growing around them, and Dean was about to suggest they hunker down right where they were and do their best with one tent when Sam called out.

“Look! Up ahead!”

 _Oh, thank fuck,_ Dean thought, relief flooding through his chest like warm air against the cold.

In the distance was something square.

It was covered in snow, distant, obscured by trees—but those kinds of straight, rectangular lines didn’t come from nature. It was a building, and that was all they cared about at the moment.

Lightning burst above them like a sheet billowing across the treetops in the breeze; it rolled from one side of the forest to the other, illuminating everything stark bluey-white for just a moment. More thunder followed immediately, and then another flash of lightning—it was all around them, thick, pelting snow in a violent, vibrant, electrical storm.

“We have to get down!” Cas yelled. “Out here with all these trees—”

The rest of his yell was lost to thunder, but they were all following his train of thought.

They ran. The snow seemed to fall even heavier just as a punishment, blocking their vision and howling around them ferociously.

“Come on!” Kevin encouraged, yelling. “I think it’s a cabin!”

In the falling snow, Dean hoped that no one would be able to see the tears that leaked from the corners of his eyes as he bit down on his lip, forcing movement out of a leg that just didn’t want to function. It burned and screamed at him, and he wanted to scream right back but knew it wouldn’t help.

Sam and Kevin were ahead now, leaping through the downpour of snow toward the building as it came closer, growing in size and detail. It was indeed a cabin—not one that had been used in a long time, by the looks of it, but it had a roof and intact windows, and to keep the storm off that was all they needed.

Dean gave out a low huff of pain, but before the sound had even finished leaving his mouth, Castiel had moved into his side. He didn’t look at Dean as he grabbed his hand, pulling his arm up over his shoulder, his other hand snaking around Dean’s waist.

Silently, he took Dean’s weight, and they moved on, as fast as they were able.

Thunder rolled, lightning flashed, sheets of snow fell.

Dean glanced over to Cas to see that his face was drawn and tired-looking, cold sweat across his brow under the furred parka hood. He looked exhausted. Weak. Human.

He wasn’t, but that didn’t stop Dean lowering his arm from Cas’s shoulders. A brief flash of irritation passed over Castiel’s face until Dean merely repositioned his arm, wrapping it around Cas’s side as he moved so that they were both supporting each other.

Kevin and Sam, ahead, made it up onto the covered porch, bending and wheezing when the wet snow finally stopped hitting their faces.

Cas said something, but the thunder stole it, and Dean was too frozen and winded to ask for a repeat. So, they limped and hobbled and dragged on until they reached the porch steps, Dean no longer sure if Cas was holding him up, or if he was holding Cas.

As Dean and Castiel’s feet met the porch, the wind suddenly dropped as if it had been merely taunting them all along, and the snow lightened almost instantly back to soft, pretty flurries once more.

The pure relief of not having the snow falling on them was unbelievable.

Dean pushed his hood back, leaning on the dark, soaked wood of the cabin exterior as Sam worked the lock, his banging knocks having gone—entirely expectedly—unanswered. His fingers, Dean assumed, must have been just as cold as Dean’s were because it took him much longer than usual to break through the straightforward lock on the cabin door. The lockpick he had on his keys, just like Dean always had, should have made short work of it—but they all shuddered and shivered, even Cas.

But after a few minutes, with a beautiful, wonderous sounding click, the latch popped and the door swung open an inch or so.

“Oh thank _God,_ ” Kevin gasped, pushing straight past Sam and almost falling over his feet in his haste to be inside.

Cas followed him in more sedately, but old hunter habits die hard, and Dean was left on the porch with Sam, both of them scanning their surroundings intently before heading inside.

The cabin was slightly elevated on a hill, and a break in the trees revealed nothing but miles upon miles of taunting trees, rolling off into the misty distance as far as they could see. The last vestiges of daylight clung onto their edges, but as the brothers stood side by side on the old, rotting porch, they gave up their tenuous hold. The sun slipped below the horizon, tumbling them into the kind of darkness that only the wildest places provide; deep, thick, and barely penetrated even by the torch that Sam automatically grabbed from the side pocket of his pack.

With the wind gone, the forest stretched on in the dark, hundreds of acres of unnerving silence.

Sam cut his torch once or twice more through the pitch black, and he exchanged a quick look with Dean, both satisfied for now. They had turned, moving toward the door when they both heard it.

If someone asked later, Dean would have to describe the sound like a howl, but it was more like a creak—an otherworldly, cracking roar like the sound of a giant, ancient glacier grinding against itself under pressure.

It was like the ice had formed a beast, and it laughed them into the cabin.

 


	3. Chapter 3

The inside of the cabin was dry. That was about all that could be said for it, but given the four trembling, freezing men within its walls, dry was a win. The lower level was split into three rooms; a tiny kitchen, an even smaller latrine, and the larger main room that seemed to be part bedroom part living area. There was no couch, but a fireplace and a wooden dresser took up one wall, and there was a coffee table and threadbare rug. The wall furthest from the door boasted a full sized, timber bed frame complete with a bare mattress. There was a wooden stepladder that led up to a smaller second story attic. Dean hadn’t looked up there yet, but he’d be willing to bet it was a second bedroom, or at least useable as one.

Everything was dusty, disused, aged. It looked like a hunter’s cabin—the deer kind, rather than the “them” variety—and Dean knew from his research that hunting like that hadn’t been allowed in this section of the Northwest Angle State Forest for many, many years. The light of Sam’s torch didn’t show them much else of use or interest, but Kevin helpfully held it while Sam strode straight over to the fireplace and began working on a source of heat and light.

The sound that Dean and Sam had heard out on the porch unsettled them both; they’d stood stock still, waiting, but it hadn’t come again. So after a few minutes, they’d slowly moved inside, wordless, and double-checked the locked door behind them. Dean didn’t know about Sam, but the eerie, alien noise had chilled him right to the core. He’d never heard anything like it in his life, and in their kind of life, you heard some damn weird shit.

“Did you hear that noise in here, the one from outside?” Dean asked Cas quietly while Sam worked on the fire.

Cas nodded slowly, his eyes flicking sideways to Dean, his voice low, for the two of them. “I did. I didn’t want to spook Kevin any more than usual, so I clattered around a bit, but I’ve never heard anything like that.”

“Me either,” Dean agreed quietly. “Could be whatever is hanging people in trees.”

Cas just nodded.

A warm glow began to spread from the fireplace as Sam’s flames caught, devouring the old, dry wood that had been already laid—as per cabin tradition—in the hearth before the last visitor left. There was a decent stack of dry wood in the corner; so that at least was one thing they wouldn’t have to worry about.

Dean limped across to the simple pine dresser next to the fireplace and leaned on it with his hip, relieving some of the pressure on his knee. His winter jacket was heavy with melted snow, dripping erratic dots onto the floor around his snow-encased feet. Without thinking, Dean stomped his boots to dislodge the white clumps, and let out a sharp hiss of pain as the jolt traveled up to his knee.

Cas was at his side immediately, frowning. “Dean, I could—”

“No.”

Castiel’s usually plump lips settled into a thin line, but he didn’t fight.

Kevin watched Dean and Cas, standing close together still near the dresser, as if they were a dangerous powder keg, waiting to go off. He parted his lips as if to rebuke them for backtracking on the minor progress they’d seemed to make earlier in the day, but his eyes drifted off past Dean to the side, looking to the dresser. His mouth parted slightly, worryingly, and prompted Dean to follow his gaze.

The dresser had been a lovely one in its day, Dean thought, handmade and sturdy, with some decorative carvings across the front. But now it was worn and encased in a thick layer of gray dust, like the rest of the interior. It had drawers and cabinets at the bottom, and then a hutch above with open shelving that held an assortment of jars, pots, and trinkets.

At first, Dean wasn’t sure what Kevin was gawping at.

But then he saw them.

Dangling from thin leather loops, like necklace talismans or rosaries, were simple iron and wood charms. They hung from the round knob of the small door and were looped around some of the jars on the shelves, and one or two rested, abandoned, on the dusty surface.

Slowly, Dean reached forward, picking one up by the leather cord and bringing it up to eye level. The room was still dim, Sam’s flickering fire not lighting the furthest corners much at all, but it was clear what Dean held.

The charm depicted the exact same symbol that had been carved into the tree he and Cas had sat beneath at lunch.

Thurisaz. Giant, anguish, or danger.

The rune spun excruciatingly slowly as it dangled in the air. None of them seemed able to take their eyes from it.

A long minute passed before Kevin cleared his throat. “There’s more of them.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, turning to look at the other, similar but different, talismans scattered around the dresser.

“No, I mean _more of them_ ,” Kevin said with more emphasis, raising a hand to the wall above the fireplace, behind Castiel.

On the stone of the chimney stack, there were nails, driven deep into the cemented rocks the chimney had been formed from. They were used as hooks, and more of the runes hung from them.

“Here too,” Sam said, pointing to a bunch dangling from a nail on the back of the door.

They all looked at each other. It was harder, packed in thick layers of winter clothing, to get a read on anyone’s state; they were stuff, and their body language was muffled like a voice behind a gag. But even so, Dean could see the tension in Sam’s shoulders, the tightening of Cas’s jaw, the way Kevin blinked more rapidly.

“You got any more info on these, Cas?” Dean held out the one which still danged from his finger, the copy of the rune from earlier.

Cas shook his head. “I can’t discern their meaning. All I can tell you is that the runes themselves, as an object, are not malicious. They just are; it’s like someone wearing a cross or a pentacle, or a bird or a bee; a talisman, nothing more. There’s nothing inherently negative about the symbolism. It’s merely odd to find them here, in the middle of a forest on this continent, particularly in a tribal area.”

“Right.” Dean lowered the Thurisaz rune back to the top of the dresser. “Maybe there was a Nordic history nut living around these parts, huh?”

Sam met that with a skeptical look, but no one said anything.

“Well, I’m not going back out there to sleep,” Kevin said, indicating the door. “There are runes out there too. So, I’d rather be in here, with the warm ones.”

Nods all around conceded his point.

With the decision made and no further terrifying, glacier-beast noises from outside, they set abound shedding their soaked outer layers and digging the essentials out of their substantial hiking packs. Glad to be out of their wet coats and boots, they all sat around the fireplace on the floor.

They ate the last of the sandwiches they had packed, leaving the dried foods and energy bars for then, by unspoken agreement.

To Kevin’s delight, Dean then revealed that he really had packed some smores supplies in the outer pocket of his backpack, and thankfully they had survived both his fall and the weather. Sam had located a single fork in the old kitchen, and with a quick clean in the sink, it was good enough to toast marshmallows one at a time.

Sam only had one—of course—before pushing up off the floor, his knees and back cracking. “I’m going to check out the upstairs, see what we can do about sleeping arrangements. It’s been a long day.”

They all nodded quietly in agreement before Sam disappeared up the wooden ladder that led to the attic space above. They could hear him walking a few steps above them, dust billowing softly from between the ceiling planks above the main room. After only a moment, Sam ducked his head back down and called across to them.

“There’s two rooms up here, this main one has two beds, and there’s a small secondary room or closet of some kind, but it's locked. Could break it open if you want.”

Kevin stood, licking the last strings of melted marshmallow from his fingers. “I call one of the beds upstairs. Sam’s too big to share, so he should take the other, and you two can fight it out down here,” he said, waving vaguely between Dean and Cas.

“Yeah.” Dean sighed. It made sense, after all. “No need to break open that other room Sam. I guess this was someone’s home once; we should leave it how we found it for the most part. You guys go and rest and stuff.”

“Alright. Night,” yelled Sam.

“Goodnight Sam, Kevin,” Cas called from his spot next to Dean in front of the fire. He sat with his feet pointed to the flames, drying out his hiking socks and his forearms folded on his knees. He’d been quiet while Dean, Sam, and Kevin ate, watching the wood slowly glow and burn and letting them get on with it.

“You alright, Cas?” Dean asked after a minute, suddenly aware that he probably didn’t ask it enough.

It was proved that he didn’t when Cas turned a slightly surprised expression over to him, though he smoothed it away quickly. “I’m fine, Dean.”

“Really?” Dean scooted himself up next to Cas as Kevin was gone, mimicking the angel’s position in front of the fire, with his bad leg stretched out to the side. “Or are you just saying that because that’s what we always say?”

Cas’s smile was weak. “Well, you did teach me that humans lie, Dean.”

 _Yeah, and I showed you that pretty regularly too,_ Dean thought, a constricting band tightening around his ribs. He let out a small, humorless huff of laughter, and they lapsed back into quietness. After a minute, Dean reached over for the fork, unsticking it from on top of the package of graham crackers where Kevin had left it, and stabbed a marshmallow.

“You ever had one of these, Cas?”

He shook his head. “No, I haven’t. I wasn’t able to explore many cuisines during my time as a human, and as an angel, I simply don’t need to.”

Dean shoved down the wave of guilt that rose up automatically, pushing the angry buzzing back behind his teeth and determinedly ignoring it. They couldn’t keep doing this. “Don’t need to, sure, but what about wanting to? You’re not curious about things?”

Cas drew his eyes away from watching the flames, tilting his head slightly as he turned it to look at Dean. “I suppose, sometimes. Things are very different, as an angel. I haven’t really learned how to assemble the flavor of each individual molecule into an overall taste, though I’m aware that some of my brothers and sisters have.”

“You should make one,” Dean said, deciding suddenly. He held the fork, with marshmallow at the ready, out to Cas. “Here ya go.”

A tiny frown of concentration flickered across Cas’s face as he looked between the marshmallow and the fireplace in front of them. “Uh, okay.”

“Well, go ahead.” Dean grinned.

Obediently, Cas held the marshmallow out toward the flame, somewhat cautiously.

“A little more than that,” Dean said. He shifted to the side, leaning into Cas just a little so that he could reach to wrap his hand over his, guiding the fork forward a little further and into the edge of the flame. “There you go.”

Cas’s hand under his was dry and warm; his fingers were slightly more tanned than Dean’s, a little shorter and thicker than his, perhaps, but smooth and somehow elegant looking. Realizing that he had just been staring at his hand covering Castiel’s for a very long moment, Dean gulped and drew his eyes away sharply, hoping that Cas hadn’t been looking, or that he hadn’t made him uncomfortable.

Whatever Cas had been looking at, it certainly hadn’t been the marshmallow. It was on fire; very, very on fire. Totally black, and as they both turned to regard it, it gave up its tenuous, gelatinous hold on the fork and splatted down into the fire.

“Uh—” Cas made a soft, almost embarrassed sound.

Dean chuckled, already reaching for another marshmallow. “Let’s try that again. Not so long this time.”

Cas nodded solemnly, taking the marshmallow from Dean and wiggling it on to the end of the fork with far more seriousness than such a simple act should require. He reached it out toward the fire. “Like this?”

Dean realized what had happened last time; Cas was holding the sugary treat deep into the middle of the flames now, and it was charring quickly.

“Well,” Dean said. “Some people like them really, really well done. Me,” he fished another one out of the plastic bag and gestured to Cas to retrieve the fork, “I like them a bit more toasted and gooey than totally cremated.”

“Perhaps you should help me again,” Cas said as he replaced the marshmallow, so quiet that Dean almost didn’t catch it.

But he did. He froze for just a moment, before shoving the odd choking feeling he suddenly experienced down into his deep internal dumpster of shit to stress over at some other, even less appropriate time. “Yeah, uh, I can do that,” he said, reaching out to cover Cas’s hand with his own, much more deliberately that time.

Cas’s hand relaxed, allowing Dean to guide it.

“There we go. You can kinda turn it a bit if you want, just like that,” Dean said, the two of them gently rolling the marshmallow in the flame until it was perfectly golden, just a bit burned on the edges, and ooey-gooey all through. “Perfect.”

Dean withdrew his hand quickly to grab the rest of the supplies, holding out a graham cracker for Cas to deposit their prize on. Cas smiled with a surprising amount of satisfaction as he did it.

“Alright, now grab the chocolate—that’s it—and squish it together.”

Cas followed the instructions and pressed the top graham cracker down on top of the warm, gooey treat. White bubbles of marshmallow squirted out from inside, a thick drop spilling out onto Dean’s thigh.

“Oops!” Cas grinned, reaching down and running his finger along Dean’s pants to scoop it up. Once he had it on the tip of his forefinger, he just looked at it, as if he didn’t know what to do with such a thing.

“Hey, don’t waste it!” Dean laughed, darting forward to retrieve the big chunk of melted marshmallow with his tongue.

His brain didn’t come back online until Cas’s finger was in his mouth, and the angel was looking at Dean very strangely.

“Uh, here,” Dean said weakly, flushing. “You should try it. You made it, after all.”

Cas looked a bit dazed and uncertain, but he nodded slowly. Instead of taking the s’more from Dean’s other hand as intended, he simply leaned down and bit into it.

Dean’s mind needed to stop blowing so many circuits; these repairs were going to get costly, in the dark later that night when he was alone with his thoughts.

Or not alone.

 _Of fucking course,_ Dean thought. _That’s why Sam ran upstairs. There’s only one bed down here._

Dean had to physically turn his head back toward the fireplace to drag his eyes from Cas’s tongue as it darted out to chase the strings of marshmallow across his lips. Clearing his throat, he forced out, “So, what do you think?”

“A lot of molecules, unfortunately,” Cas said, with something that sounded like genuine regret. “The taste leaves something to be desired, for me. But the experience was extremely pleasant nonetheless.”

Dean wished Cas would stop making it sound like merely spending time with Dean was some worthy endeavor. Whatever it was, Dean was far from worthy of it.

He stood up, awkwardly pushing himself up with his hands to make up for his stiff leg. “I’m tired. You should get some rest too if you can. You’re still not back in shape.”

Dean didn’t mean it to come out quite how it sounded, but then using his words had never been his strong point.

Cas fell silent as Dean grabbed his sleeping bag from its spot strapped to the top of his backpack, using the dim, flickering light from the waning fire to unroll it onto the mattress. He remained quiet as Dean found his toothbrush and moved into the cabin kitchen. Dean brushed his teeth in the water the cabin provided but spat it out into the sink, not entirely sure that it would be a good idea to drink anything from a tap in such an old cabin. When he moved back out to the main room, Cas had moved one of the uncomfortable looking kitchen chairs to sit in front of the fire.

Dean sighed. This was his fault, he’d been a dick, yet again, and he could feel the familiar bustle of frustration at his actions building in the back of his neck. From the pile of hiking bags that they’d all left at the end of the bed, Dean retrieved the final sleeping bag that they’d brought for Cas, “just in case”, and spread it out next to his own on the mattress, before climbing into bed.

“Come on, Cas,” he said softly, hoping his regret would carry through. “You can’t stay awake all night.”

Cas’s eyes didn’t leave the fireplace. “I used to sit and watch over you all night. Before you ordered me not to, of course.”

“I didn’t order you Cas; I’m not your keeper. It’s just kinda creepy.” Dean tugged the sleeping bag up around his shoulders, wishing that he had a pillow. He tried arranging his arm underneath his head as best he could so that he didn’t have to place his face on the gross old mattress.

“Well, I will do my best to look elsewhere tonight, regardless. Here,” Cas said quietly, appearing next to the bed on shockingly noiseless feet. He held out his trench coat, from the pile of bags near the bed; carefully rolled and folded into a pillow-like pad.

Dean squinted up at him, sleepy and confused.

Cas made a tiny huffing noise of what might have been amusement, his expression unreadable as he reached down. Before Dean could object, Cas gently lifted his head and tucked the trench coat underneath. “It’s not memory foam, but I thought it might help.”

Dean turned his face down into the trench coat, inhaling deeply. It was a little stiff for a pillow, but a damn sight better than just his arm. Even better, it smelled like Cas. A scent that after all these years was as familiar to Dean as Cas’s face: the smell of wet copper, and feathers, and the air after a rainstorm.

“Thanks, Cas. This’ll make an awesome pillow.” Dean found that he meant it.

It took Dean a moment to register that Cas had drifted back to his chair. It hurt his chest to think that Cas would rather lose rest than have Dean believe he was weak. “Cas,” Dean said, a lot more softly this time. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just worried about you. Come to bed, okay? You need to rest, and we shared a room last night, it’ll be fine.”

“Sharing a room is rather different than sharing a bed,” Cas said quietly, but he did stand and move the chair back to its spot, before progressing toward the bed.

Sighing, Dean closed his eyes. “We’re in sleeping bags. We’re only sharing a bed in the most literal of senses.”

He felt the mattress lurch down beside him a few minutes later, and the sound of polyester shuffling filled the air. Just when Dean thought Cas was settled, it’d start up again, shuffling and twisting.

“What’s got your feathers in a twist, Jesus. Lay still,” Dean mumbled, opening his eyes.

His breath caught, audibly, involuntarily, as he opened his eyes to see Cas’s bright blue ones staring right back, only inches away. Cas’s gaze dropped immediately, down to some indeterminable spot on the flat mattress.

“I’m sorry,” he said, with what Dean thought might have been a trace of sarcasm. “Even now I’m still not really used to laying down much.”

 _Oh._ Dean rolled over so that he lay on his back, looking up at the raw wooden planks that made up the ceiling above them. _Am I ever gonna be able to say something without putting my foot in my mouth?_

“Here,” Dean said after a moment, realizing part of Cas’s problem. He lifted his head and re-rolled the trench coat into a longer pillow they could both use. It was thinner that way, and he could feel the mattress again, but it was worth it to give Cas some minimal comfort.

“I’m sorry.” Cas’s much quieter apology surprised Dean. When he looked back over to him, Cas’s eyes were still downturned to the mattress. “I realized this is inconvenient, and I’m not much help. I apologize.”

“Dude, what’ve you got to apologize for? Seriously. It's not like you meant for any of this to happen—it’s all my fault, for the most part. And what is so bad about having to fucking sleep, Cas? You hated being human, I get that, but it’s a little offensive that you act like its inconvenient and beneath you to even _sleep_ like one.”

Dean wasn’t sure where the vitriol came from, but it was left burning suddenly between them. He felt it pour out of his throat, and even as the words came out, he knew half of them were wrong, not what he actually wanted to say. He squeezed his eyes shut again as if he could make it go away by hiding from it.

The silence was too heavy, and it stretched on uncomfortably until Cas broke it; so softly Dean would have missed it if he’d have done something as noisy as blink or exhale at the wrong moment, it seemed.

“I didn’t hate it, Dean.”

“Yeah, well, kinda seems like you did. Kinda seems like you should’ve.”

“No.” Cas rolled onto his side, and although Dean couldn’t see him, he could feel him staring. “It helped me understand you a lot better. And Sam and others, of course, but mostly you. There was other stuff I liked too. Peanut butter and jelly. Hoodies. That feeling your muscles get when you’ve walked all day, and then you sit down and rest; like you’re floating. Hot showers, burritos. Those were all good things.”

Dean listened, his eyes still squeezed shut, like he could deny all of it. Like he could block out the thought of Cas being weak. Alone. Struggling. Because of him.

“Mostly though, I understand emotions better,” Cas continued his soft soliloquy into the fading light, the fireplace embers providing enough light to dramatically shade their faces as Dean rolled onto his side, finally allowing them to face each other. “Humans have so, so many emotions. I enjoyed them, and I understand my own better as a result.”

“Huh,” said Dean eloquently into the small, warm stretch of mattress between them. He studied Cas’s face tiredly, trying to work out if he was lying, just saying what Dean needed to hear. Dean was, after all, the one who taught him to lie.

“Go to sleep, Dean,” Cas said quietly after a moment. “We’ve got time for all of this.”

 _Time for all of what?_ Dean thought, but sleep was blurring his edges, and the world was drifting away.

 

_The gas station was as dimly lit as ever, brightened only by the same perpetual flickering of the one, ill-maintained street lamp outside the large front window, highlighting the peeling plastic window displays of ads that were a few weeks out of date. “2 for $1 Sodas!”, “Car Oil 20% Off!”, “Premium Gas Now 2 Cents a Gallon Less!”, the selection proclaimed. Dean didn’t need to read them. This dream was more familiar to him than the real store it was based on. The sickly golden light came in from the lamp outside and illuminated the cigarettes, jerky, and porn mags in an eerie, unsettling way. It was always empty, this part of the dream, and Dean felt incredibly, frighteningly alone._

_Dean couldn’t control his footsteps in this dream place any more than he had been able to any other time; hating every step he made, feeling tears prick at the back of his eyes, he moved up to the cash register. A turn to the right. Eight steps forward. Like a sick dance, the moves committed to memory. His hand lifted, without his consent, rising to the door handle of the minute stockroom that must be inconvenient enough to work in, never mind sleep in._

_And there, the yellow light that suffused the store poured through the widening crack as the door opened, revealing Cas’s feet first, the same as always; tucked into the navy, second-hand sleeping bag from the thrift store. Dean braced himself for his voice while studying Cas’s hand clutching at the strap of his backpack._

_“Cas!”_

_Ah, there it was. Dean watched Cas’s face as his eyes fluttered groggily open, no doubt taking in the shelves of cleaning materials and the bottom of the rusty mop bucket, getting his bearings. Dean could look at him all he wanted here, that was the only good thing about this endlessly recurring nightmare. He could gaze at the strength of Cas’s jaw, his eyes running up the length of it as his fingers so often itched to do, feeling the sandpaper roughness of that slight, day or two old scruff that Cas always had. He could watch the way that a few hairs still refused to travel the same way as the rest of his thick mane, leaving Dean desperate to reach out and correct them. The wrinkles at the corner of Cas’s eyes—deeper, he’d swear, than they used to be—which he wanted to lean into, softly breathe against, and press his lips to._

_It would be easier, Dean thought idly as Cas rose and moved past him, if the angel was just hot. If Dean just wanted his body—and what a body it was—this would have been much easier to shove away, and he’d likely have managed to move on from this infatuation, years ago._

_But no. If Dean knew anything about life, it was that it could be needlessly cruel; so instead, it had instilled in Dean the kind of deep, abiding love that crashes into your life like an angel through a barn door and rearranges all of your insides so that they’ll never be the same. He’d accepted it long ago. It got harder every day. But Dean took the pain as his due, and pushed it down, hiding it from the brilliant, holy creature who would never, could never, make the burden lighter by sharing it._

_Cas walked on into the store. Helplessly, Dean followed._

_In his Gas’n’Sip vest and his boots, Cas walked the aisles, squinting suspiciously, searching for the source of the noise. To try and find the origin of Dean’s voice, calling his name in a place where he never expected Dean to be. Because he never expected Dean to find him. Or to bother looking._

_Dean braced himself this time, knowing it was coming, but the scream was always ripped from him involuntarily as the_ _windows of the gas station imploded soundlessly, showering glistening flakes of glass across Castiel. He cried out, shielding his face with his arms. The glass clung to his sleeves and hair, though today, to Dean’s eyes, they looked like tiny glass snowflakes. Increasingly like snowflakes…_

_Cas stood back up, looking around, scared. Confused._

_Dean didn’t bother closing his eyes. He’d still see it, Cas’s death, it was burned into his brain. Each dream was slightly different; sometimes the blade came from behind, making Cas’s skull glow like a lantern. Other times Dean would look down and see the shining silver weapon in his hand._

_But always, no matter what, Cas died with Dean’s name on his lips._

_Cas’s eyes slid up. Straight to Dean. His hand came forward, reaching out as if for something he couldn’t quite make out._

_“Dean?” Cas whispered, and Dean waited for it to devolve into a high-pitched scream as the blood erupted from his mouth—_

_But no. This time, Cas’s hand touched his chest, three fingers extended._

_The pain was unbearable, a burning, searing, lung-punching agony that drew a reverberating scream right through Dean’s teeth._

_He could feel the curse of the touch burrowing into his flesh._

_“CAS!”_

_He was suffocating; he couldn’t—he was—_

“DEAN!”

Cas’s voice was loud and real, and inches in front of his face.

Cold, Dean was very cold.

Someone was shaking him.

Dean blinked, his vision clearing, and he saw eyes, glinting in the dim moonlight, staring intensely into his. Worried. Afraid.

“Cas?”

“Dean, thank God,” Cas’s head drooped forward, and for a moment Dean thought that the angel was going to pull him into a hug, but he did not.

His leg hurt, a dull scream around his kneecap. His chest burned and stung. His lungs ached as if he’d repeatedly been huffing icy air. He felt chilled and damp, and—

“Why am I outside?” Dean asked dazedly, still not feeling like the world was wholly real.

“I don’t know, Dean,” Cas said, his hands still gripping at Dean’s shoulders as he searched his face in the near-darkness. “I woke up, and you were gone. I was afraid that I’d done something wrong and upset you, so I came searching for you and—”

Dean raised an eyebrow at the way Cas’s sentence cut off sharply. “And?”

“And you were out here.” Cas slowly released Dean’s shoulders, his hands dropping to his sides. “You were asleep, it seemed, but crying. Calling my name. And there’s…”

Dean followed Cas’s gaze down through the softly falling snowflakes to the fluffy ground at their feet They were perhaps a hundred yards from the cabin, Dean guessed; he could make out the distant glow of the fireplace embers through one of the windows in the dark. There were two sets of footsteps leading through the trees from the cabin to where they were standing. One of Dean’s, one of Cas’s. The snow the spot where they were was disrupted, speckled with garish splats of blood and churned up with long, clawing finger marks.

Dean’s hand came up to his stinging chest, slowly adjusting, remembering.

“Dean?”

He raised his eyes to Cas’s, registering the concern there. “I’m okay,” he said, nodding slowly.

“You scared me,” Cas stated, like a simple fact. “Has this happened before?”

“Not… like this.” Dean’s mouth was too dry, a coppery blood-like taste crowding his tongue to match the splashes of crimson against the white around their feet. An involuntary shuddering began in Dean’s torso and spread out to his arms and hands.

Without any fuss about it, Cas reached over and slipped his arm around Dean, crowding him warmly to his side and turning him, supporting him against his body. “We should get you back to the cabin. You can tell me in bed.”

Dean might have dwelled more on the oddness of hearing Cas say that phrase, indicating their sharing of sleeping space like it was a normal thing. Which it certainly wasn’t. But he was too distracted, the frightening, nightmare feeling that plagued him throughout those incredibly vivid dreams still wrapped around his heart.

That one had felt different, though.

As they stepped into the cabin, which felt blessedly warm after the snow, Dean looked down at his still stinging chest with a wince. The front of the pale gray Henley shirt he was wearing stuck to his sternum with blood.

Dean let out a low gasp at the sight of it.

“Sit on the bed,” Cas murmured, though whether he was still spooked or just trying not to wake Sam and Kevin, Dean couldn’t tell. “I’ll get a cloth; we should clean it up before anyone sees.”

The fact that he didn’t even need to say that he wanted to conceal the worst of the deep, painful puncture wounds at his chest from the others warmed something inside Dean. Cas just knew. He’d tell Sam that something weird had happened, but he didn’t need to see the concern in Sam’s eyes if he saw Dean wincing and blood covered, like this. He didn’t need the pity. He didn’t deserve it. And Kevin… well, Kevin was just a bit squeamish.

Cas retrieved their first aid kit from Sam’s pack. He wisely didn’t mention Dean’s knee or healing him, but he did pass over another couple of painkillers and a bottle of water, as if he could read the discomfort on Dean’s face as easily as someone reads a book. He brought the kit with him and sat right next to Dean on the bed— _dude, personal space, geez—_ angling himself so that he could easily access Dean’s chest. He already had the tiny, travel sized bottle of hydrogen peroxide in his hand, along with a clean wad of gauze to use to apply it.

“Are you going to tell me what you think happened?” he asked very quietly, leaning back just a fraction so that Dean could peel off his bloody shirt.

Telling Cas exactly what happened would involve telling Cas about the nightmares. Not that Cas wasn’t already aware that Dean had vicious night terrors on occasion; he’d probably heard Dean wake, gasping, when they’d shared a cabin on The Looney the night before. But he probably assumed they were about hell, or hunts, or other events in his past. Not like these recent eerie dreams.

Dean bit down on the inside of his cheek before he spoke. “I’ve had this recurring dream, recently. A nightmare, about some regrets I have, I guess. But this time… something changed. You—”

They both paused; Dean in voice, Cas barely noticeably in his quest to remove the foil from under the cap of the peroxide bottle. After what felt like a tiny hiccup in time, as they silently acknowledged Dean’s subtle tip that the dream was about Cas, he continued. So did Dean.

“—Usually the dream ends suddenly, always the same way, but this time you reached out and…” Dean felt strange, for some reason, saying that the Cas in the dream had touched his chest. Cas and Dean were around each other all the time; they touched often, platonically. But somehow the words stuck in Dean’s throat, and he found himself demonstrating instead, lifting his hand with three fingers extending toward Cas’s chest.

Cas looked down, watching Dean’s fingers rest against his shirt with the barest of touches. He nodded. “And then the wounds,” he whispered, bringing the gauze up to Dean’s bare, bloodied chest.

Dean didn’t cry out—it stung, but after all, he’d had much worse—but he did pull in a sharp breath as Cas softly ghosted the wet gauze across the strange wounds. He looked down, examining them. They were round, deep punctures, but luckily, they were each less than an inch across, and he wasn’t losing too much blood anymore. Most of it had soaked into his shirt, which would be a loss, and ended up all over the snow, which was another mystery; as if something had punctured into his chest, the blood pattern was wholly inaccurate.

Cas was quick and efficient, but extremely gentle. Once the wounds were clean, he fixed white sticky patches over them, to keep them that way. Dean could have cleaned them himself, of course, but he’d allow himself to admit that he was feeling spooked and fragile. Or admit it in his mind, at least. Cas’s touch was soothing in a way Dean should probably have been embarrassed by, but he was too tired and sore to care.

“Let’s go back to sleep,” Cas suggested softly. “There’s still a few hours until dawn. We can tell Sam and Kevin what happened in the morning.”

Dean nodded. Cas moved to withdraw, and Dean quickly darted out to grab him, covering Cas’s hand on his chest with his own, just for a brief second. “Thank you.”

Cas gave him a slow smile, something slightly amazed about it, though Dean couldn’t hazard a guess as to what. “Of course, Dean.”

Dean slipped on a clean t-shirt, and Cas disposed of the bloody one and the soaked gauze somewhere out in the kitchen. They climbed back into their sleeping bags without too much fuss, and the room fell quiet again, though the odd tension Dean had been growing accustomed to between them seemed to have dissipated, or at least shifted.

Dean studied the bare wood of the cabin wall for a few long minutes before he admitted to himself that he was afraid to go back to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes again he felt instantly alone, and his already uncomfortable chest constricted painfully.

_Damnit._

He tried for another few minutes, breathing in and out rhythmically, trying to calm himself, but it was no use.

“Cas?” he asked nervously into the dim light, his cheeks burning against the trench coat pillow.

“Yes, Dean?” came the whispered reply from behind him.

“Could you—” Dean cut himself off, too embarrassed, one hand rising to fiddle with a fold in the trench coat fabric. He sucked in a couple of deep breaths, taking in the coat’s comforting, copper and feather and ozone scent.

The mattress behind him creaked and gently lurched.

After another indeterminable minute, A hand raised cautiously to Dean’s side. It rested there, warm and heavy, in the carefully-safe zone just south of Dean’s ribcage.

“Yeah, that,” whispered Dean to the trench coat.

Dean felt a nod against the back of his neck as Cas shifted closer, and he pressed his eyes shut, and basked in the feeling of the angel drawing him nearer, wrapping over him protectively. God, how he wanted this.

He’d never deserve it.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

The next time yelling pulled Dean awake; it wasn’t Cas.

He wasn’t _completely_ asleep. His eyes had first fluttered him back into the world a few minutes before, and he’d immediately stiffened. Cas’s arms were around him still, and he could feel soft puffs of air on the back of his neck as Cas breathed. He’d held him the whole time they slept. There were swathes of chunky polyester sleeping bag between them, there was nothing sexual about it, but there was something else, something almost worse.

He was pushing it down, trying to ignore the way his heart was beating when he heard floorboards creaking upstairs. Immediately, his sleepy, half-awake thoughts became less about his feelings for Cas and more about how he needed to extract himself from the angel’s arms before Sam could see. He began to pull away from Cas, trying to wiggle himself out of his surprisingly octopus-like grip—

“Kevin?” Sam’s voice, drifting down from the attic. “KEVIN!”

Suddenly Dean was very awake, as was Castiel. Cas had a strange look on his face as he regarded Dean for the split second they had before a scream echoed around the attic room. Both of them stumbled out of bed and raced towards the timber ladder that led to the attic level. Dean hissed and grunted, his leg a hindrance, and it took Cas a moment to get his sleeping bag to let him go.

By the time Dean had awkwardly hauled himself to the top of the ladder, Sam’s voice had been replaced by Kevin’s; a scream, several of them in fact, and then an exclamation of pure panic.

“WHAT IS HAPPENING!”

“Woah, woah—” Sam was attempting to be calming now, but he sounded terrified. “Stay still till we work this out— _stay still!”_

Dean couldn’t immediately see Kevin when he made it to the attic. The room was small, the sloped ceiling giving the space a cozy feel. It wasn’t as dark as Dean expected, two big skylight windows letting in the early morning sunlight to illuminate two skinny beds and a single nightstand between them; nothing else.

Except for the other door, which was to Dean’s left, and open.

“I thought you weren’t going to open the door?” Dean said for some reason, moving to the side so Cas could stand up next to him after making it up the ladder.

“I didn’t,” Sam said it with so much horror, his eyes not moving from whatever was _past_ the door, that Dean felt an odd shiver.

“Kevin?” Dean called, stepping up to the door. He placed the flat of his palm on it, pushing it open the extra few inches to give him a clear view.

Cas moved behind him and somehow managed not to stumble into Dean when he suddenly stopped with a loud gasp.

“Kevin!”

The kid was shaking, kneeling on the floor, and Dean couldn’t blame him.

The room was long, rather than wide, like a really deep walk-in closet. There were no windows, the light from the panes in the roof not penetrating this corner of the attic space. It smelled musty and shut up, something almost waxy in the air amongst the floating dust motes that drifted past Dean, seeking freedom. There was no furniture, as such; there were two sconces, affixed directly to the pitched ceiling, one on each side of the small space. They lit the area with just one low flame apiece, flickering so that the shadows around them jumped and juddered threateningly.

In the middle, it sat.

It was the creepiest thing Dean had ever seen in this life of creepy ass shit.

“Holy fucking hell,” Dean burst out in a rush. “What is that thing?!”

It appeared to be constructed of twigs, dried grasses, and thorns. It was vaguely humanoid in shape—bent oddly, a hump to its back, and with very wide feet. It leaned forward, almost threateningly. There was no head on it; the bound, woven twigs stopped, leaving a jagged opening full of air half way up its neck. Its arms, skinny and jagged, were bent at the elbow and raised in such a way that, coupled with its threatening lean forward, gave it an aggressive, vicious stance. The ends of the arms didn’t have hands, as such. Instead, a huge, heavy antler had been tied to the end of each arm with strips of leather—giant, many-pronged antlers, clearly from the head of a huge, ten-point buck. They had been sharpened to an even more vicious point than nature intended, and tiny, ice blue runes were dotted over their surface; runes like the ones downstairs, or on the tree in the forest. Pieces of cut two-by-two sized wood jutted out from under each armpit to brace the thing against the floor. The wood was dyed; an old, almost black red that Dean didn’t need to touch to know would be flaky with dried blood.

“I believe it’s an idol,” Cas answered from behind him, and Dean would have sworn again and again that he heard a hitch and a shake to the angel’s eternally calm timbre.

Before the idol, on his knees on the floor, was Kevin. He trembled, panting, the heaving of his chest visible even from behind as the knobs of his spine curved forward, adulating before it. He was entirely naked. His skin, his black hair, even the floor around him, carried the signs of tiny blood splats and trickles. As Dean’s eyes roamed, gobsmacked, over Kevin’s bare back, there was more and more to take in. Deep scratches ran up his sides and across his shoulder blades and the back of his neck. His hands were frozen at the back of his head in panic, pulling at his hair, and Dean could tell from the red mess of his short, bitten nails that the wounds were self-inflicted. Between the scratches, the blood formed runes—some of them in places Dean didn’t think Kevin could even reach without breaking his arms.

“He, uh, well.” Sam cleared his throat from behind them, the first he’d spoken since Dean and Cas had made it upstairs. “He was rocking, when I found him — just rocking back and forth, slowly. It sounded like he was chanting, or something, but I couldn’t make it out. When I shouted he snapped out of it.”

“Okay, okay,” Kevin said again, and Dean could tell from the tremble in his words that the kid was sobbing, still frozen in place, his face down, worshiping at the foot of the…thing. “You’ve all seen, please let me move, please let me out, please—”

It was Cas that came forward, bringing a sheet that Dean hadn’t seen him take from one of the twin beds, and carefully wrapping it around Kevin’s shoulders. He kept an arm around him, protective, as he helped the kid up from his sore knees and guided him out of the room.

“Let’s get you downstairs, first of all,” he said in a low rumble.

Dean and Sam were left upstairs alone, exchanging looks.

“How did he—” Dean began.

“I don’t think he knows, Dean,” Sam interrupted, speaking quietly. “When I snapped him out of it he looked utterly terrified. I don’t think he has any idea how he got there, or what he was doing. To start with, it was like he couldn’t even move; he just screamed.”

“What about the door?”

“It was locked last night, I swear. I took a look at it, but there wasn’t even a keyhole, Dean. I think it was locked from _this_ side.” Sam took a moment to look around the tiny room, taking it all in with a shudder.

“Let’s get out of here,” Dean said, telling himself it was because Sam looked spooked when it was definitely just as much because he was.

Sam blew out the candles, and Dean firmly closed the door behind them.

Kevin was sat on one of the kitchen chairs in front of the fireplace, crying.

He was still wrapped in the sheet, balls of fabric in his fists as he hugged his arm around himself. Cas was clattering the tiny kitchen; Dean was almost certain he was making Kevin some tea from their supplies.

Dean struggled to think of what to do.

“Let’s see if we can warm up a bowl of water for him,” Sam suggested very softly. “That way he can at least wash the blood off and get dressed.”

Dean nodded, happy to follow along as they went to squeeze in alongside Cas in the minute cooking space, looking for a pot or bowl they could use.

 _And I thought I had a shitty, terrifying night,_ Dean mused.

They found a big stock pot under the rusted sink, and Dean scrubbed it out while Sam worked out how to get the wood-powered stove functional. They didn’t speak, still shaken by what had happened, despite everything they’d been through in their lives. They say that watching paint dry is dull, but it turned out that watching water boil was no wild time either. But neither Dean nor Sam complained or moved. Once the water had simmered up to a comfortable temperature, gauged by Dean’s finger and an approving hum that sounded very loud in the silent room, Sam grabbed the pot by its handles and moved back to the main room with it. Dean located a towel amongst their bags.

Dean, Sam, and Cas stepped outside onto the porch to give Kevin some privacy, and for a minute they just stood, breathing in the early morning air. Dragon-like curls of smoke puffed out from them all and floated over the porch railing, and they all gazed out, taking in the misty spread of pines, tamarack, and spruce trees that went on for miles, silent and unforgiving. It felt like they were being judged by nature for daring to come here, not so much as a bird showing its face.

It was still snowing, though lightly now, nothing like the odd, sudden storm that had chased them into the cabin. Dean found that he was now a little bit suspicious of that ferocious thunder-snow.

“Dean,” spoke up Cas eventually. “You should tell Sam.”

Dean nodded. Any thoughts he’d had of sparing Sam and Kevin from stress were gone now, chased away by the antlered thing in the attic.

“I had a dream last night,” he began. “A nightmare. A recurring one I’ve had, but last night, sleeping here,”—Dean pulled down the neckline of his long-sleeved, khaki t-shirt, showing Sam the gauze at his chest—“it manifested, somehow. I woke up outside in the middle of the night, bleeding.”

He didn’t mention going back inside, Cas tending to his wounds or the cuddling that occurred after.

_It wasn’t cuddling, anyway, it was just—_

_“_ Jesus, Dean. Why didn’t you wake us up?”

“I, uh…” Dean shrugged. “It didn’t seem urgent at the time. Creepy as fuck but…”

He trailed off. Now, it seemed ridiculous. He should have woken Sam, told him what happened.

“I’m sorry,” Dean said before Sam could reprimand him or get pissed. “It was a mistake. I should have woken you. And Cas only didn’t fight me on it because he thought I’d refuse, I’m sure. So, I’m sorry.”

Sam blinked, and even Cas looked a bit surprised.

“Right. Well. Everyone makes mistakes,” Sam conceded, giving Dean an uncertain little smile. “But thanks for, uh, communicating. Now.”

Something settled between them all, some genuine progress on Dean’s part, and luckily Kevin called them into the cabin out of the cold, wet-smelling air before Dean had any chance to ruin it.

There wasn’t a table to go with the two rickety kitchen chairs, so Sam and Cas took them while Dean and Kevin perched on the edge of the bed. Kevin was fully dressed but pale looking and Sam rooted around in his pack between his knees, looking for breakfast for everyone while they spoke.

“Tell us what you remember, Kev,” Dean said.

“Nothing—absolutely nothing,” he choked out. “I was glad to be getting to sleep on a bed, given that the alternative had been the forest floor in a tent. And happy that I wasn’t freezing. I went to sleep, and then the next thing I remember is Sam yelling my name.”

“Well, something happened to Dean while he slept, too,” Sam said. He was speaking gently, Dean noticed, in the tone of voice that he often saved for post-hunt news when someone’s wife or brother wasn’t ever coming back. He was trying his best to comfort Kevin, Dean thought, and at least let him know he wasn’t the only one affected by this place.

“Uh, yeah,” Dean said, clearing his throat and pulling down the neck of his shirt once more to reveal a bit of his chest. The gauze bandages were still stuck to his chest, looking lightly pink from some wound seepage but not too bad. “Dreamed about something, and it happened to me for real.”

“What did that to you?” Kevin asked, squinting. “What did you dream about?”

Dean was still wondering how much to tell when Cas answered for him.

“Me. In the dream, I did it to him.” Cas turned his eyes to the last dying lumps of wood ash in the fireplace, avoiding Dean’s gaze. There was something… hurt, something not right with the way he looked. Dean worried, briefly, that Cas might thoroughly misunderstand what he’d dreamed of; but that wasn’t the time to address it.

Sam passed energy bars to each of them in silence.

“Do any of you know what that is? The—the thing upstairs?” Kevin asked very quietly.

Cas pulled in a deep breath and shifted on his chair, the legs creaking as he moved his weight forward. He rested his forearms on his knees, knotting his hands together before he spoke up. “I might. Or at least, I have a hunch.”

Dean spread out a hand in front of himself, gesturing to Cas. “Well, go ahead buddy. It’s not like we’ve got cell service, or internet, or access to the Angle Inlet Little Lending Library, so you’re pretty much it. Whatcha thinkin’?”

All eyes on Cas as they munched their energy bars, Cas began to explain.

“There is a creature in Nordic mythology called a Jötuun. Jötnar, in the plural.”

“The offspring of the ice giants? Demi-gods?” Kevin butted in, blinking. “Like—”

Cas fixed Kevin with a long, tight-lipped look, and the kid stopped speaking.

Looking back down to his hands, Cas seemed to go into story mode. “I figure we are dealing with something Nordic, given the runes, and the environment goes in their favor. But the idol… that made me think of long-lost tales of something in particular.”

“Something old, then,” Sam said.

“Older than you can probably easily imagine. The idol, with the horns and the lack of a head, reminded me of the symbolic representation of the Jötnar, a Scandinavian forest spirit of sorts.” Cas’s brow creased sourly for a moment, but he continued. “Long ago, before humans were widespread upon the Earth, certain angels had reason to walk here. Those oldest of us, closest to god at the time, who watched most closely over his creations.”

“Oh great,” muttered Dean, lowering his head into one hand. “It’s an angel story. Fuckin’ dicks do nothing but mess shit up.”

The look Cas shot him was particularly poisonous and chased Dean back to his energy bar without a word.

“Without human vessels so easily come by,” Cas continued, “some angels took intelligent non-human vessels. Creatures that, for the most part, no longer exist and have become mere footnotes of mythology.”

Sam was watching with great interest, and Dean knew that he’d be quizzing Cas for more info on those creatures, later.

“It was rumored, for a long time, that some of the angels did not follow the rules which are usually set for us while on Earth, feeling that if they were not in human vessels, the usual fraternization prohibitions did not apply.”

“Wait, you mean…” Dean raised an eyebrow. “Angels in mythical meat-suits, fraternizing with the locals, gettin’ jiggy with it?”

“Not so much the locals…” Cas sighed. “In Norse Mythology, two of the sons of Loki are often referred to as Jötnar, descended from ice giants.”

Dean sat up straighter, his energy bar forgotten in his fingers. “Wait a goddamn minute, are you saying what I think you are?”

Cas nodded slowly.

“What?” Asked Kevin, looking uncomfortably between them all.

“We found you in front of some creepy idol to a monster descended from Cas’s dead prankster brother, that’s what.”

Kevin didn’t look any less confused.

Sam swallowed down his last bite of breakfast before he leaned towards Cas, diving into what Dean thought of as his dusty-researcher-mode. “So, the Jötuun—if that’s what’s causing all the weirdness around here—is a nephil?”

Cas shook his head. “No. Nephilim are half angel, half human. Jötnar are half angel, half ice giant. They don’t have the same potential as a nephil because they don’t have human blood, but they do have demi-god like powers.”

“Well no offense Cas, but your jerk of a brother was into some freaky shit, okay,” Dean said.

Cas’s eyebrow arched dangerously, and he fixed Dean with a pointed glare that made him squirm. “How is an intelligent creature like an ice giant any different from a human, to an angel, Dean? Some of the ice giants were said to be legendarily beautiful, and they wrote poetry and treated their lovers well, the tales go. Perhaps humans could learn a few things.”

“I thought you were all emotionally constipated assholes, anyway.”

“No, Dean,” Cas snapped surprisingly viciously, his chest jutting out as it tended to when he got particularly riled up. “That’s just what you think of me.”

“Woah, woah,”—Sam held up his hands, wide-eyed—“I don’t know what this is, but can it, guys. Kevin. Idol. Jötuun.”

Cas slowly released a breath, his chest deflating with a slightly embarrassed cringe, if Dean was reading him right. He didn’t know what was up with Cas this morning, but they could talk about it later—or not, knowing them—right then, Kevin was the priority.

“So, if it is a Jötuun,” said Dean very calmly, “what does that mean for us?”

Cas flicked his blue eyes briefly to Dean but kept his gaze down at his hands as he answered. “Well, I don’t know much about their motives or behavior. Jötnar are rare, even by monster standards. But I have some theories. If they are, indeed, descended from my brother Gabriel, then I consider it likely that their powers may in some ways mimic his.”

“Can’t archangels do pretty much anything?” asked Kevin fearfully.

“In theory,” Cas begrudgingly agreed. “But each of them had certain particular talents, ways of using their grace that were more natural to them. Michael burns and scorches what he touches. He is to fire what Lucifer is to ice. Raphael was air, and wind, and lightning. But Gabriel was always more… fluid. Changeable. He could warp and change things around him with ease—”

Kevin’s mind, it seemed, worked faster than Sam’s or Deans. He threw the remaining half of his energy bar down onto the floor, stomping his foot like a toddler.

“You have got to be kidding me!”

“Uh?” Dean said.

“Circles! We’ve been walking in shitty fucking CIRCLES! The whole damn day!” Kevin was out of his seat, pacing the floor like a small, snappy dog who thought he was ten times larger than he was. “I’m gonna kill it! The snow! The cold! I could have been INDOORS!”

It took Dean a moment, but then he let out a low chuckle. “Seriously, Kevin? This thing might be impaling hikers in trees as a pantry, and your main gripe with it is that it deprived you of wi-fi?”

“And Netflix. And my BED.”

“What I don’t know,” Cas said, ignoring Kevin and his tantrum and looking to Sam, “is why there would be a Jötuun in Minnesota. I’ve only ever heard of them in Scandinavian countries and even further north—”

“Well, you said it was old,” Sam offered thoughtfully. “If it is that ancient, then way back when, there was probably nothing stopping it from just walking right across the Bering Strait from Europe.”

Cas blinked suddenly. “Oh. Well, yes. Very good Sam.”

“Alright.” Dean rubbed his hands over his face for a moment, sighing. “Knowing that it’s likely a Jötuun—how does that help us? Do we know what it wants, why it’s killing?”

“Regretfully not,” Castiel admitted. “It only gives us an idea of the type of thing to watch out for and probable ways of killing it. A Jötuun is a physical being, but very hard to kill because of its ancestry. However, its spirit—it’s grace, effectively—will be tied to something, much like a normal forest spirit.”

“Right.” Dean nodded firmly, glad to have the conversation back onto a track he had some knowledge about—monsters and killing ‘em. “So, it’ll probably have a home tree, or something similar.”

Paused near the fireplace, Kevin snorted. “Yeah, because that helps. It's not like there’s many trees around here.”

Even Sam shot Kevin a withering look.

“The next question then,” Dean forged on, determined to ignore the whiney prophet, “is if it can warp reality like Gabe could, how are we supposed to find it? Do we just keep walking and hope that eventually, we end up at the Red Lake tribal lands like we’d hoped?”

For a moment no one answered, the warm cabin air heavy and thoughtful. Eventually, Sam sighed and pushed up off his chair.

“Until we come up with any better ideas, we better keep walking. So, let’s warm up some more of that water, get ourselves washed up as best we can, get these various injuries redressed and cleaned, and get moving. We’ve got food, we’ve got tents. Might as well see what this Jötuun wants.”

They all nodded and began to shift slowly about the cabin, trying to keep out of each other’s way.

In under an hour, Dean was tying up the top of his tall, aluminum framed hiking pack once more and affixing his rolled sleeping back to the top of it. They had checked their tents, which Cas and Dean were carrying in their backpacks, and their food, water, and hunting supplies, which were split between Sam and Kevin. It was a lot of weight, but hunts required a certain amount of necessities that couldn’t be left behind, as did the hiking itself.

They had been quiet and a little tense, with none of them daring to venture back upstairs to where the idol was. They didn’t even mention it anymore, only shooting Kevin sympathetic looks. The kid didn’t seem to be doing too badly, even if his mood did swing wildly between needlessly pissy and disturbed quietness, but they were all subconsciously keeping an eye on him.

Dean found himself watching Cas out of the corner of his eye too, as they prepared. He couldn’t understand what had changed between Cas’s quiet, comforting presence in the night to Cas’s tetchy, irritated demeanor with him that morning. Was Cas bothered, when he woke up, that Dean was still curled up in his arms? Did he regret it? Should Dean apologize? He didn’t know, and with Dean’s emotionally stilted nature even more upheaved of late with all they had been through, he wasn’t sure how to make himself ask.

“Ready to get out of here?” Sam asked, breaking the silence.

“Burn the place to the ground,” Kevin muttered under his breath, grabbing his backpack. He didn’t hoist it to his back, carrying it in front of him until he had pushed past Sam and out through the door onto the porch. Dean exchanged a look with Sam; they both felt the same when it came down to it, but burning the cabin and its grotesque idol down wouldn’t be as wise as it sounded in the middle of a forest, snow or not.

The stress of this trip was building up at the top of Dean’s spine, giving him a strange headache across the back of his skull. Conscious of Sam watching him, he gulped a couple of painkillers down before he headed out; his knee was still hurting, and the punctures at his chest were sore, he didn’t need something else to worry about too.

Limping his way out onto the rotting, damp porch, Dean pulled the door of the creepy cabin shut behind himself gratefully; no matter how cold it was outside, no part of him was disappointed to leave after a night like that.

Silence greeted Dean on the porch.

No one had moved off it, and he had to angle himself to the side to slip out of the cabin, dodging all of the enormous backpacks and puffy coats.

“What’s the holdup?” Dean asked, awkwardly attempting to stand as close as possible to Cas without actually touching him.

Cas’s head turned. His bright blue eyes were brilliant in the morning light, but they were wide and uncertain. He didn’t speak, merely gestured forward, using his right hand to indicate over the crumbling, mossy railing and out to the trees.

Dean’s eyes followed the lines of his arm, and then Dean felt his mouth hang open far enough that he emitted a white puff of chilled breath.

“Oh my god,” he said, quietly.

No one moved.

Towering pines, like the creaking masts of ships amidst a sea of snowy leaves, slowly swayed overhead in the wind, giving rise to a constant _shushing_ and creaking sound throughout the forest. Huge tamarack trees, yellowish and bulbous at their bottoms beneath their winter coats, filled in the mid-height of the forest before newer, smaller paper birch trees grew lower to the ground, though still taller than any of the men on the porch. There were thousands of trees, tumbling waves of trees that rolled of into the distance, fading into the mist. They were beautiful, and Dean would have enjoyed the view if it wasn’t for the pine trunks.

The trunks were thick, some of them a two-man-hug sort of size, and they dominated the landscape around the trails, rough and intimidating. Where they had been brown and plain the night before, the trunks now bore chilling decoration.

Every single tree surrounding the cabin had been stripped of its bark on the side closest to the building.

They each bore one or more dark, carved runes, seared deep into the trees' living flesh like a brand.

Deans throat was dry, and he had to slide his tongue around his teeth a few times before he could speak.

“Alright, so I know what that one means,” he said, pointing to the Thurisaz rune on a tree to the front of the small clearing. It was at least two feet tall, carved to be seen. “But what about the rest?”

Cas slowly moved his pointing arm from tree to tree, answering clinically, without emotion. “Hagalaz… hail, storm. Othila… heritage. Mannaz… human. Kaunaz… malady, death. Iss… ice. Eiwaz… dreams. Gebo… generosity, gift.”

“But what does it all mean? Is the Jötuun trying to tell us something?” Sam asked.

Castiel’s nod was slow. “I believe so. If I'm following its intentions correctly with the runes, I believe that the Jötuun is trying to say that the storm led us here to receive a gift in the form of a dream.”

Dean spluttered. “A gift?” He waved at his chest as he spoke. “This was a gift? Well, it fuckin’ hurts! Sucky gift, angel spawn!”

Castiel’s brow knitted tightly, his expression darkening. “A Jötuun is _not_ an angel, Dean, no matter how badly you think of angels. Please stop inferring that they are anything more than demi-god like creatures.”

_Oh._

“I don’t think badly of angels, Cas. Not all of them. Just the ones that act like dicks—not you.”

Their eyes met, and something was happening there, but Dean was drawn away from working out precisely what by Sam clearing his throat loudly, and doing that sudden eyebrow raise he was prone to when he was uncomfortable.

“Alright, guys. Let’s just get going. Take a compass bearing; get moving.”

With as much resignation as reluctance, they looked at their maps. They agreed on a compass direction before stepping off the porch and leaving the cabin behind, their footsteps cleaving dark holes into the fresh, untouched blanket of white snow.

 

The stark whiteness of the ground around Dean’s feet made the forest appear a little brighter than it actually was; hardly any light filtered down through the trees, heavy, snow-sodden clouds covering up the late-autumnal sun. The trees were oppressive, and despite the crispness of the flakes tumbling gently through the air, there was no clean, zingy, snow smell; the air hugged the group damply and left the scent of mold and mud on their skin.

Sam led, followed by Kevin, then Dean. Cas brought up the rear, though their line was far from strong as they meandered through the snow and muck, doing their best to avoid tree roots and snowed over warrens. It was slow going, entirely off the beaten track as they were by then.

They hiked in silence, though the forest was full of noise—the trees overhead roared quietly in the wind, and their feet squeaked and crunched dully through the snow. There was still not an animal to be seen; it was unnatural, Sam had noted more than once. Not one bird, not a single scurrying rodent. The forest felt entirely suspended in time, in spite of the weak late October sun tracking overhead amongst the clouds.

Dean had only his thoughts and the cold to distract him from the pain in his leg and the soreness at his chest. He’d bound his knee up tightly that morning, and checked the dressings on his chest wounds when they’d been preparing to leave. He knew that Cas could have healed both of them with a warm hand pressed to Dean’s forehead. He knew, somewhere in his mind, that he should let him. But he couldn’t, could bring himself to _take_ more from the person that kept giving everything for them and getting nothing but more problems in return. He didn’t deserve good things, not after everything that led them here, not after sending Cas away.

Yeah, Cas had made mistakes. But with the best of intentions. And Dean had, recently, done that very same thing; made a horrible choice and had to hope it would turn out for the best.

Neither of them had been rewarded for it, in the end. One set of problems just rolled into another, that was how their lives worked.

And there they were.

Dean didn’t know if Cas was still angry at him, or if he thought Dean was mad at him, or where they stood. They were best friends. Still. Always. But did Cas trust him any more? Could he?

Dean found himself slowing his pace, his steps smaller until Cas caught him up.

The angel didn’t say anything, tension in his shoulders as he looked askance at Dean, waiting.

They walked quietly for a minute while Dean gathered his thoughts, eventually settling on: “You were pretty riled up back at the cabin.”

Kevin and Sam trudged on ahead, unaware of the quiet words behind them.

Cas turned to look at Dean for a moment before the forest’s uneven nature insisted that his eyes watch his feet.

He took a minute to think of his response, and when it came, his voice was quieter and more sorrowful than Dean expected. “I apologize, Dean. I was angry, and it was uncalled for.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. I say dumb shit.”

A smile ghosted around one corner of Cas’s mouth. “Yes, you do indeed say some dumb shit’. But we have been working these past few days to… communicate better, you and I, have we not?”

“I, uh…” Dean blinked, considering it as he took a moment to navigate around a boulder. “Yeah. I guess we have.”

“And my attitude this morning was not conducive to that. So, I apologize.”

“So,” Dean asked, keeping his eyes ahead on the drifting snow. “What gave you such a bad attitude, huh?”

“I was… frustrated.” Castiel admitted. “I’m much more aware of my emotions than I used to be, and perhaps I sometimes overreact to things. To you.”

“Frustrated, huh?” Dean grinned, telling himself he was keeping things light as he deflected wildly. “What, one go with that reaper chick not enough for you?”

Cas’s side-eye was icy. “Not that kind of frustrated, Dean.”

Dean smirked.

“Well,” said Cas. “Occasionally. But not particularly this morning.”

Dean could have sworn it was a tree root he tripped over; the fact that there wasn’t one to be seen was really no one else’s business. He was unfairly flustered for a moment, and he thought that Cas could tell from the strange look he was giving Dean, and that was just unfair. Clearing his throat, Dean remembered what else he’d wanted to say, to get the conversation back on track.

“Frustrated or not, you made a couple of comments about me and how I think of angels that were kind of unfair.”

“I’m not sure they were. You hate angels.”

“Not all of them. You know I don’t mean you when I talk about angels.”

“But that’s just it, Dean,” Cas said, exasperated but calmer than he’d been that morning, at least. “I am an angel, again. You avoid the topic of my humanity like it mortally offends you, yet you disparage angels so often I don’t even know which you’d rather I be.”

Dean frowned deeply, pausing long enough to reach across to Cas’s bicep, sinking his fingers into the arm of Cas’s puffy parka coat. “Cas, you don’t have to be anything. I don’t think of you as an angel or a human, dude—no more than I sit around thinking that Sam is human, or Kevin. You’re just a person. You’re just you, buddy. I like you just being you.”

Dean didn’t realize that they’d both stopped walking, turned slightly toward each other, until he registered that Cas’s hood had slipped back, and snowflakes were beginning to accumulate on the ruffled tips of his dark brown hair at the front, releasing small drips onto his forehead.

“Hey, now—” Dean reached out before even thinking about it, running the back of his fingers across Cas’s brow and up through his hair, catching the worst of them before he reached back to tug his hood up properly. “—remember you gotta try and keep warm for now. Just until your grace is fully topped back up.”

There was a pause—one just long enough for Dean to register how close they stood to each other, to see his hand resting on Cas’s shoulder and for his mind to scream _Dean, what the hell are you doing—_ before Cas cleared his throat and responded.

“Yes, Dean. Thank you. I will try to remember.”

He didn’t move back, but the wind carried Sam’s voice back down the trail to them both, calling on the breeze.

“Hey, you two! Come on and catch up, the snow is picking back up again!”

They didn’t jump apart as quickly as Dean expected, as quickly as they always had done before. It was a much slower disengagement, their feet moving before their eyes did.

With the flakes beginning to whip around them a little more in the breeze, they hurried after Sam and Kevin.

 


	5. Chapter 5

Another hour of weary walking and pushing against the cold passed. Kevin had given up complaining at least, and Dean was exceedingly grateful. While this was more hunt than it was bonding trip, Dean certainly hoped to get as much of the latter out of it as possible. Which was exceedingly hard when all the nerdy prophet did was whine.

He was on edge though, a little squirrely as he often was, and Dean could tell he was still annoyed to be there, to be focusing on anything else other than his painstaking translations, the whole reason he was stuck with the Winchesters in the first place. Dean could be a bit of a dick at times—he wasn’t entirely lacking in self-awareness—but he wasn’t a total asshole; so when Kevin paused to check his compass for the hundredth and gave a long sigh, Dean took pity on him.

“You can say it.”

“I’m pretty convinced we’re going in circles.”

“Hmm.” Dean nodded slowly. “We’re just walking in a straight line, kid. We have three compasses between us, and some angel senses. It’s a huge forest, maybe we just didn’t get there yet…”

Kevin’s lips pursed slightly, but his eyes on Dean’s were unwavering. “A big forest, huh.”

Dean turned to Cas, who stood next to him where they’d all stopped. “What do you think, Cas?”

Cas blinked as if surprised to be asked—and didn’t that make Dean feel just great on top of everything else.

“Uh, I’m afraid I can’t help any more than just read the compass. My “angel senses,” as you say”—little shit did the air quotes and everything—“are not up to par. I thought, when we began this trek, that it was just due to my somewhat weaker state since regaining my grace and casting out Gadreel; but it seems increasingly likely that it’s actually not that at all.”

Dean pressed his lips together hard, bringing a hand up to his mouth in exasperation. “Damnit. So you think—”

Cas interrupted him with a nod before he spoke. “Yes, I believe the Jötunn is to blame. I fear that the creature is in some way warping reality around us, disorienting us.”

“Great,” said Sam, under his breath. “Alright. Well, Cas—why don’t you and Kevin watch the packs for a minute and dig out some water for everyone. Dean and I could look for some higher ground, maybe—”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed, butting in. “Good idea. See if we can see any signs of civilization, something to aim towards. Or at least something to center our compasses on that might not move.”

Cas looked between them both, and then to Kevin. A small sigh that most would have missed was the only sign which Dean picked up on that Cas was annoyed at being left to babysit. “Alright. That is a good plan. Rather than waste what little water we have though, we should probably take a minute to melt some snow. As it seems that we no longer know how long we’ll be out here.”

“Ahh, yeah. Good call, buddy.”

Cas’s words raised an uncomfortable point that Dean had been dancing around in his mind all morning. They had only prepared for a two-day hike—they had some emergency supplies, some extras. But how long would it last? And what would happen if they ran out of food? Dean was happy skinning a rabbit and drinking snow much like the next desperate hunter, but another fact was that they hadn’t seen a single animal or edible plant since they’d arrived. Whether that was nature’s doing or the Jötunn’s, he wasn’t sure. But he felt like blaming the Jötunn anyway.

Dean and Sam left Cas and Kevin under a tree with their packs and began walking uphill away from them.

“Up that way.” Sam pointed ahead of them. “Looks like there’s some kind of ridge, a half mile or so maybe.”

“Alright.”

Sam looked across at Dean, then down to his knee as they swished through the snow. “You gonna make it, Dean?”

“I’m fine. It’s easier without the backpack weight, at least. Sorry for slowing us down.”

Sam rolled his eyes toward the gray, heavy hanging sky. “Sure. You’re the one that’s slowing us down. Not the recently recharged angel, or the almost-smote mathlete, or me, free from the trials and used as a meatsuit.”

Dean’s eyes fell to the snow ahead of their feet, silent. Yes, he was hoping Sam would get over it. Forgive him. That they could apologize. But he sure wasn’t ready to joke about it yet.

“Let’s just get a move on.”

Sam didn’t answer, settling for another eye roll.

They walked for about ten minutes, slower toward the end as the uphill gradient grew steeper, though Sam knew better than to mention Dean’s grimaces and small huffs of discomfort.

The paper-birch trees that littered the lower lying ground of the forest gave away to pine and tamarack only as they climbed higher. They weren’t high enough for the air to be thin, but in the biting cold and with the eternal chance of getting a snowflake or two in your mouth, it felt that way to Dean. He gritted his teeth and swallowed down his complaints.

This wasn’t any harder than he deserved it to be.

“Up there—” Sam pointed, after another couple of minutes. “Looks like the top of the ridge. The trees clear out a little.”

Dean nodded, and they headed for a point between two huge, heavy pine trunks—monsters that towered over the rest—where a patch of mist and cloud could be seen, much lower down than the peaks of gray they had directly overhead.

When they reached the top, Dean took a moment to rest the base of his spine against one of the two huge pines, pulling in some long, slow breaths.

“You sure you’re gonna be okay? You should just let Cas—”

“No.”

Sam knew better than to ask again, but he swallowed and huffed, turning away from Dean wearing bitchface number seven.

Easing his back up off the tree, Dean shuffled to stand beside Sam, and look out over the Northwest Angle State Forest.

“Holy shit,” whispered Sam.

“Son of a bitch,” Dean murmured alongside him.

The view was both breathtaking and terrifying.

Up high, their view of the wild, beautiful forest was unhindered. There were no fences or paths visible; just trees and occasional juts of stone, rolled between and over gently rolling hills. There was no space which cleared out, no natural breaks that could be seen. There were no distinct divisions—nature didn’t care where state land ended and where the lands belonging to the Red Lake Nation began. It was all the same. Snowy, green, and endless. It stretched on as far as the eye could see in every direction they were privy to.

“Fuck,” Dean said again, quieter.

“How big is this place supposed to be?” Sam said, helplessly.

“Over one hundred and forty-four thousand acres,” Dean said, almost mindlessly. “So f’in big.”

Sam, to Dean’s annoyance, looked surprised that he had an actual answer.

“What? I did the research.”

Sam held his hands up innocently. “Okay, okay. Didn’t say a word.”

They looked for a moment more, side by side, before Sam turned and began to trudge back downhill.

“Suppose we better go give Cas and Kev the great news,” Sam said, leaping down the hill in small bounds, scattering waves of snow with the sides of his feet as he slowed himself so he didn’t fall.

Dean took one last look out over the endless-looking, silent sea of trees. Like ripples disrupting the surface, the treetops swayed to and fro in the wind. On the ridge, everything seemed even quieter; not so surrounded by the constant creak of wood and the constant cracking of ice and snow. A streak of sunlight broke through the heavy, snow-laden cloud cover, and illuminated every falling flake in its wake. They were dazzling, like jewels, and Dean’s eyes followed them down to the trees further down the ravine in front of him, the opposite direction to where Sam was retreating. The sunbeam moved on, grayness returning, and Dean began to turn and move along after his brother.

It was then that a tiny movement caught his eye, where the sunbeam had been.

He jumped, and immediately turned back, going perfectly still. It suddenly felt like seeing an animal moving amongst the trees—even just a rabbit, or snow hare, or sparrow—would be an amazingly cheering sight.

“Dean?” he heard Sam call from a hundred yards away. “What’s the hold-up?”

Dean didn’t know why he felt like he couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, but he was just frozen; waiting, trying to spot the movement again.

Seconds slid by, making him doubt he’d seen anything at all.

Then his eyes were slowly drawn to one of the skinnier trees down the hill in front of him.

The very slightest movement; just enough to catch his gaze.

But that wasn’t a rabbit or a hare… it was something about four or five feet off the ground, on the trunk…

Still immobile, Dean squinted.

He heard Sam moving through the snow behind him, coming back.

It wasn’t a bird, or a deer, or a— _shit, shit, holy fucking shit, that was a…_

“SAM!”

“Dean?”

“SAM!”

“Dean!” Sam appeared beside him in a shower of snow. “What the hell, dude? What—”

Dean slapped his right hand over Sam’s mouth as fast as he could, suddenly realizing he was shaking.

A muffled _what the fuck_ came through Dean’s fingers, so he pointed, silently, to the tree down the incline.

“It…” Dean whispered. “There was a hand, Sam, a freakin’ hand—you gotta believe me, it was like, withered and bandagey and—”

Sam pulled Dean’s fingers away from his face, his frown all annoyance. “A hand? Really Dean? You can face down archangels, but you’re scared of a damn hand?”

Dean couldn’t even explain it. His heart was hammering against his ribcage, a cold sweat beating across his brow. His eyes scanned the trees again, desperate, ignoring Sam.

“Hey,” Sam said, softer, his annoyance fading as he took in Dean’s genuine terror. “A hand, like… what kind of hand? Human? Not just a trick of the light, or a bird, or—”

“Have you seen single goddamn bird since we got here Sam?” Dean huffed, unsure why breathing was so hard.

Sam’s awkward silence was answer enough.

“It looked like a human hand. Small and skinny, like a teenager or a little old person or something… but it was gray, Sam, and like… mummified, or something…”

“Well, come on,” Sam said, resigned and uncomfortable-sounding. “Let’s head back to the others and see what they think.”

The Winchesters had seen more scary things in their lifetimes than most people could handle, and little phased them these days (beyond airplanes and clowns.) But something about that creepy hand, moving slowly around the side of the tree, clawing its way across the bark… and the fact that the tree was one of the smaller ones in sight, that the trunk wasn’t thick enough to be disguising a person…

Dean couldn’t help looking back over his shoulder at the tree on the incline, repeatedly, until it was out of sight.

 

 

“So, get this,” Sam announced fifteen minutes later when Dean limped back up to Cas and Kevin. “Dean saw a spooky, bandaged, disembodied hand on a tree.”

The angel and the prophet sat on their packs, to stay up off the snow, and on a flat rock in front of them squatted the tiny camping stove they had extracted from Sam’s bag, a delicious smelling pan of black coffee simmering away on top of it.

With an indulgent moan, Dean drew close to it, like a moth to a flame.

“What?” Kevin wrinkled his nose.

“Just a hand?” Cas asked, his head tilted to the side inquisitively. Noting Dean’s movements, Cas gave a pleased little smile and indicated for Dean to take his seat on the pack under the tree. Without saying anything, he pulled Dean’s cup from his bag and began to fill it with steaming liquid.

“Just a hand,” confirmed Dean. “We climbed up to the top of the ridge about half a mile from here. Afforded us a pretty uninterrupted view for miles around—which, bad news bears, by the way, can’t see a damn thing, just endless trees. But there was a movement on the trunk of one of the trees down the hill, and that’s where I saw it. Tree was too skinny to have anyone standing behind it though.”

Cas straightened up, bringing the warm coffee over to Dean.

“Did you go down and investigate?” Kevin asked skeptically.

“What? No,” Dean said, frowning. “I told you, the tree was too small to hide anything behind it and it didn’t happen more than the once.”

After handing Dean his coffee, Cas took a couple of steps back and stood calmly in the snow, observing everyone. Noticing, Dean shifted to the side of the hiking back he was sat on, looking over at Cas and wordlessly patting the other half next to him. It wasn’t much space, but they could manage.

“So, you imagined it, then,” Kevin said, more of a statement than a question.

Dean felt his frown growing deeper, the skin across his forehead pulling as it wrinkled over his eyebrows. “No.”

Cas settled down on the pack next to Dean. It was a squeeze, they were side-to-side and arm-to-arm and thigh-to-thigh, but with the temperature being what it was, Dean hardly minded. He stretched his sore knee out in front of himself, almost absent-mindedly resting his elbow on Cas’s thigh while he drunk his hot coffee with his other hand.

“Well it sounds pretty imaginary, Dean,” Kevin bit, sounding irritated. “Did you see it, Sam?”

Sam looked uncomfortable, concentrating on making himself a cup of coffee from the pan. “No, I didn’t.”

“So?” said Dean. “He wouldn’t have, I was at the top of the ridge, and he was already heading back down when I saw it, doesn’t mean I didn’t see it.”

“So, you’ve just decided it’s real, without checking—”

“We already know,” Cas interrupted calmly, “that the Jötunn is warping the forest to trap us here, and likely messing with my sense of direction; it’s not that crazy to think he is causing—”

“Yes,” Dean fired back at Kevin, even as Cas spoke up to defend him. The tension that had been sitting in his spine for several days shot upwards, bunching at the back of his neck and forcing his teeth to grit together, hard. “I’ve decided that what _I_ saw was real. Unless you want to go up there and see for yourself, then—”

With an almost imperceptible lift in the icy breeze, the falling snowflakes began to swirl around them faster.

“Oh, YOU made the decision?” Kevin snapped, scowling. “Well that sounds about right, doesn’t it.”

“Yes! I made the—”

“Like your decision-making capabilities of late aren’t highly questionable, Dean!”

Dean fell silent.

He knew the forest was getting to them. The frustration, the cold, the sense of foreboding. But he also knew that Kevin had every right to question the decisions he made, given that they’d nearly killed him only weeks ago. But it still stung, and in his usual fashion had Dean the deep, churning urge to lash out defensively.

But he was trying to be better.

God, he really was. Trying so fucking hard.

So, he averted his eyes down to the snow, breathing hard, tension in every muscle. Leaning forward, his forearms on his chest, it probably wasn’t noticeable to anyone else when Cas lifted the hand closest to Dean, the one squashed between them on the backpack-seat, and rested it tentatively on Dean’s thigh. His thumb traveled small, soothing circles as the reassuring weight of it just rested there. It was subtle support, Dean knew, but it also felt oddly like a reward for not retaliating.

Dean’s eyes flicked to Cas, and he smiled.

“Kevin,” Sam spoke up, quietly. “We’re all frustrated, okay. And yeah, it sounds crazy. But with everything else that’s going on… if Dean says he saw something, I believe him. You didn’t see him; he was terrified.”

Dean flushed down at the snow. “I don’t know that I’d say terrified…”

“I’m sure it was very scary, Dean,” Cas said calmly. Only the tiniest twitch at the corner of his mouth gave him away.

Dean shoved sideways, elbowing Cas in the ribs so that he wobbled on the edge of the backpack, and grinned. His hand, though, stayed soothing Dean, who certainly didn’t mind it being there. He remained leaning forward though, his weight through his arms into his good knee, obscuring Cas’s tiny, comforting action from Sam and Kevin.

Wouldn’t want them getting the wrong idea.

Kevin still sat on his backpack, looking sulky, and Sam was concentrating very hard on making coffee, so he was probably fine.

“I’m sorry,” Kevin spoke up after a moment, very quiet his eyes on the curling wisps of heat that the surface of his coffee created.

“Don’t be.” Dean managed a tight, regretful smile in his direction. “You’re right.”

Dean’s words hung in the air, slightly surprised looks on Sam and Kevin’s faces. But it seemed that no one wanted to make a big deal of it.

Packing up the stove back into his backpack, Sam straightened up. He looked tired, but Dean was pleased to note that he genuinely did seem to be benefitting from the fresh air and having the hunt to concentrate on, looking more focused and less weak than he had since Gadreel had been forced out.

“We should get a move on, try to push a little farther before lunch. Even if the Jötunn is keeping us here for some reason, there’s no point in sitting in one place and freezing while it waits to show itself.”

With only light grumbles, they all agreed.

Cas stood up from the backpack, leaving Dean’s side cold. He offered Dean a hand, gesturing down to his knee. “How is it doing?”

“Getting better,” Dean lied.

Cas raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

The tight binding Dean had applied to his knee that morning was uncomfortable, but it certainly helped his knee hold his weight while he walked, and he could—for the most part—walk fairly normally, but after a couple of hours slogging through the snow, he could already feel the pain getting worse.

With nothing to be done about it so far from civilization, Dean forced a nonchalant smile onto his face and hobbled onward.

 

 

 

Thankfully, the snow trailed off into something almost pretty again. Tiny, fluffy flakes that floated on the breeze swirled in little tornados, shimmying through the air before dispersing in the wind. The group watched them idly as they hiked, tired of talking, tired of walking.

Dean, in particular, was tired of walking.

The further the morning wore on, the more pain he was in. He didn’t mention it, of course, but an injury like his just wasn’t meant to be walked on, he knew that. But what option did he have? There was no overpriced Urgent Care building in the middle of a little-known state forest.

They walked silently in single file once more, the eternal grumpiness descending, and Dean could almost feel Cas’s eyes boring into the back of his head as he limped.

Ahead, Sam drifted off the trail they’d been walking on (trail was a generous term, merely a compass bearing and a gap between the trees) and moved off to the side. A small curve of closely-growing tamarack trees provided a little shelter from the wind and snow, and there was at least a little less mud and slush on the ground.

“We should stop for lunch,” Sam suggested, dropping his rucksack down before anyone could object.

Dean suspected that Sam was the one who needed to stop for lunch, that he was tiring as the day wore on, but he didn’t say anything. He was hungry, anyway, and the pain emanating from his knee was getting more severe.

Moving over to the side, beneath the shelter of the tamaracks, Dean began to lower his pack to the ground, grimacing at the way the movement of his shoulders pulled at the small, but deep, puncture wounds across his ribs. When the pack was still a few inches away from being free of his shoulders, a second pair of hands darted in to help.

“Here,” said Kevin quietly. “Let me help.”

Dean was about to tense his shoulders and snap that he didn’t need any help, certainly from Kevin, but Cas caught Dean’s eye with his own, a pleading, hopeful expression in them. He could see _Please Dean, please just try_ written in every one of Cas’s endearing little eye wrinkles as he squinted.

“Yeah, thanks,” he mumbled to Kevin, hoping that his smile looked more genuine than it felt.

He knew he was extra cranky because his knee hurt and that he should try, as Cas’s silent look had indicated, not to take it out on anyone else. Why did Cas always have to be right about the emotional, people-y stuff? Wasn’t he supposed to be the stuffy, emotionally-stunted angelic one?

Dean had always thought so. Figured that Cas just didn’t have the equipment, as he’d once described it, to care. Not like they did, at least.

But on the flat, stained mattress the night before, Cas had talked about emotions of his own. About understanding them better.

Which of course just made the fact that Dean had awoken cuddled up with the angel that morning, fulfilling one of his most domestic fantasies entirely platonically, even freakin’ worse.

Nothing like wanting what you can’t have.

“Dean?” Cas was squinting harder at him. “Are you listening?”

“Uh—no,” he admitted. “What did you say?”

“Move. You’re standing where we want to put the tarp down.”

“Oh, uh.” Dean shuffled to the side, wincing briefly at the pull in his knee as his feet slid through the snow. “Sorry.”

Sam was still fixing Dean with odd looks as they spread out the dark blue, plastic tarp across the ground to keep themselves and their bags dry.

Dean hobbled back and forth, attempting to be helpful and locate one of the condensed, dried camping meals that they had brought with them. Every time he looked up, someone or other was looking at him with a barely concealed glare.

“Alright, I know I haven’t been Miss Congeniality, but what is up with you guys?”

“Dean,” said Kevin with an exasperated eye roll. “You’re limping around, clearly in agony, because you're a stubborn ass about Cas healing you and refusing even to rest. Imagine how that makes us feel. Imagine how that makes _Cas_ feel.”

Dean frowned. What did it have to do with any of them or Cas?

“You know what, never mind,” said Sam, waving a hand between Kevin and Dean. “Give it up, Kev. He’s just being Dean. Let’s be grateful for the progress and leave it at that.”

Irritated—he was just _irritated,_ he definitely wasn’t _sulking_ —Dean made his way over to the side of the group of trees they were sheltering under, digging in his pack for the second tarp and throwing it down to sit on, not even fully unrolled. He watched as Sam and Kevin worked out the small camping stove and got some snow heating up. They were doing something dull like calculating how many gallons of water they could make safe with the number of purification tablets they had when Cas broke away from their little huddle and made his way over to Dean.

He just stood at the edge of the tarp, looking down at Dean. The hood of his coat was pushed back. Snowflakes drifted and sparkled around him, and the weak light the forest allowed seemed to illuminate him from behind, haloing around his head. He looked beautiful in the wintery weather, and it took every bit of control Dean had to still his itching fingers, so that they didn’t pull Cas down to him and end up in his hair just like earlier. Cas wouldn’t like that, it would be weird, and Dean would be embarrassed, no matter what odd little _moment_ they’d had earlier in the day.

He sat on his hands. “’Sup, Cas?”

Castiel lowered himself into a crouch next to Dean, crossing his arms and huddling up inside his thick, puffy coat. “I wanted to try and persuade you to let me heal you, again, but I don’t want to fight with you yet again. We fight too much.”

Dean opened his mouth and closed it again. He realized that the tarp was bunched up under him, as he’d thrown it down half folded, so he gritted his teeth and lifted his butt to shove as much of it in Cas’s direction as possible. “Here, sit.”

Cas lowered himself down with the same careful, precise movements that he used for everything, nodding a quiet thanks.

“We don’t fight that much,” Dean said after a moment, feeling like he should say something.

“Yes, we do,” Cas pointed out, something akin to a smirk ghosting his lips.

“Right, but it’s—” _I don’t mean to._ Dean shifted uncomfortably.“—it’s affectionate.”

 _Shit, wrong word,_ Dean panicked.

“Yes,” Cas replied, smiling slowly. “I suppose it is.”

_Oh._

The warm, good-tense silence lasted all of two seconds before Cas piped back up again.

“That doesn’t change the fact that you’re wrong, though.”

Dean sighed heavily. “Look. I just think that you should save your strength for important stuff, okay? This knee, this isn’t important. I’m not important. I don’t want you staining yourself or getting weaker or whatever, you shouldn’t have to—”

“Will you at least let me look at it?” Cas interrupted, almost helplessly. “Please. Let me just check and make sure you aren’t making it any worse, Dean. Please.”

It was the second _please_ that did Dean in, and he nodded.

Immediately, the angel shifted his weight and moved around on the tarp, so he was near Dean’s feet. Tugging quickly and methodically at Dean’s laces, he removed one hiking boot and then the other.

Dean sat back, leaning against the base of the tamarack tree. If letting Cas check would chill him out a bit, Dean reasoned, then fair enough.

“And Dean,” Cas said quietly, a soft afterthought as he placed Dean’s boots neatly to the side, “you _are_ important.”

“Not in the scheme of things, I’m not,” Dean shrugged, placing his hands down by his hips so that he could lift his pelvis; there was no way they’d be able to get to Dean’s knee by pushing up his pants leg; the pants were far too thick to go up enough to reveal his knee. Cas reached up to Dean’s hips, helping.

“You’re important to _me,_ ” Cas said firmly, too firmly—Dean raised his eyes to look at Cas. There was a determined, forceful passion in his eyes that suddenly froze them both.

Their eyes locked and suddenly Dean was very aware that Cas was looking up at him, his intense blue gaze holding, while his hands rested on the waistband of Dean’s pants.

Cas’s fingers suddenly felt like heavy, hot brands, and Dean had no idea right then why they sent people outside for fresh air because he was choking from a lack of it.

Hastily, a flush crept up from beneath the fur edge of Cas’s pushed-back parka hood, warming his ears and the apples of his cheeks. He pulled his hands back achingly slowly as if he thought that maybe if he did it subtly enough, Dean wouldn’t notice. “You, uh, you can do that part yourself, of course.”

 _I want you to do it, Jesus Christ do I want you to do it—_ “Yeah, I’ve got it,” Dean choked out.

Cas kept his eyes very carefully averted to the other trees, as Dean shimmied out of his pants, putting them across his lap for a little dignity.

“Hurry up, Cas,” Dean said gruffly. “It’s cold.”

The angel nodded silently, and carefully lowered his gaze to the swollen, offensively purple knee. He wouldn’t even look in Dean’s direction.

 _What the hell just happened?_ Dean panicked quietly. _Was that me? Did I let too much show, did I embarrass him, did I—_

Dean’s mind ran in circles but kept coming around to the fact that, at best, it had been both of them that had ended up in that sudden, intensely spark-filled situation. In fact, though Dean was a little afraid to think it, he considered that on this particular occasion, the tension might have been mostly Cas’s fault.

There was too much to unpack, there. He couldn’t focus on it then. Especially not with Cas’s thick fingers poking and prodding, shooting pain up to his hip.

“Fuck, Cas,” Dean hissed. “Can you poke any harder?”

“Yes, Dean, of course I can—Oh. Apologies.” Cas let up, his poking turning to gentle, exploratory strokes with the pads of his fingers.

A shiver ran up Dean’s leg as Cas’s hands softly swept over his skin. Jesus, that was worse.

“Cas, Dean! Get your pants back on and come eat!” Sam called over, barely thirty feet to their left. Sam’s face, as he looked across at Dean, was carefully neutral. Far too carefully neutral.

Goddamnit. Sam had definitely seen everything. Of course.

“I believe the bruising is healing, very slowly,” Cas said, turning slightly away from Dean so that he could awkwardly wiggle his pants back up with some semblance of privacy. “But the pressure you’re putting on the ligaments by forcing yourself to walk could do much more long-term damage, Dean. You need to be resting.”

“I know, Cas. But I don’t think the Jötunn is just going to let me stroll out of here to hit up the ER for some shots and an ice pack, okay?”

“I know that Dean, but I could—”

“No.” Dean didn’t bother to clarify his answer that time, struggling up from his tarp with a heavy sigh to retrieve some food.

Castiel didn’t eat, saying that as much as it helped him feel more energized, they should save the food for the three of them as they didn’t know how long they’d be stuck in the forest. They all had arguments on the tips of their tongues, their expressions showed it clearly, but after a long and silent moment, all three nodded. He sat quietly next to Kevin while they ate, gazing off into the trees with a thoughtful, slightly troubled expression.

 

 

 

They stopped for the evening earlier than they had done the previous day. It was hard to keep track of time while walking through he endlessly gray-lit forest, but the snow was thicker than the yesterday—having been softly falling in a constant sheet since the day before—and they were all cold, tired, and hungry, even Cas.

They huddled around a small bonfire that had taken them far too long to get started, as everything around was sodden with snow. They were quiet, but for once they seemed to have a calm kind of peace between them. It wasn’t perfect, in fact, it was pretty miserable, but Dean looked around at his strange little family and smiled. They were making progress.

They’d put a pan of dehydrated beef stroganoff on the little stove to warm up and do its thing while they battled with the two tents. The small clearing that they’d come across wasn’t perfect, a little rocky in places, but they’d managed to clear enough snow and small boulders to make a serviceably flat area to pitch both of the two-man tents and build the reluctant, damp fire.

Once they were done, they sat in the gathering dark, picking at the flavorless, but at least still filling, camping food.

“It’s not too bad,” said Kevin, poking at his steel bowl of beige slop.

Dean raised an eyebrow at him and said nothing. Growing up on one-ring motel stoves and trips to the local soup kitchen when John would disappear for weeks and leave him with Sam, Dean wasn’t fussy about food. He’d eat anything, even though—given the option—his tastes were pretty specific. But that didn’t mean he’d lie about it.

“Tastes like warmed over cardboard with a little ketchup,” Dean said, shoving a big spoonful into his mouth cheerfully.

Cas sat next to him, the four men cross-legged in a semicircle with the bonfire before them. If Dean leaned just a little in the angel’s direction, their knees knocked; so he did it deliberately, calling Cas’s attention up from the snow at the edge of the folded tarp they perched on.

“You should eat some, Cas.”

“I’m fine, Dean. It is more important that you three eat, I don’t need to. Not to mention, you’re hardly selling it well.”

Dean frowned, but went back to his bowl, a little slower.

After a few minutes, Sam and Kevin began chatting quietly about some of the words of God that Kevin had pulled from the tablets, and how discussing how they fit into modern-day linguistics. Cas appeared to be listening to them with a little interest at least, but Dean angled his upper body slightly toward him again.

“Really Cas, you should eat something.”

“I don’t need it, Dean.”

“Maybe not, but it’d help you. You’ve been hungry—are you not anymore?”

Cas shifted slightly on the tarp, diverting his eyes back to the fire. “Not really.”

“Liar,” Dean said, though he kept his voice soft. “Don’t be stubborn, Cas.”

The angel looked back at Dean so that he could raise his eyebrow at him very particularly. He said nothing, but _look who’s talking_ was written clear across his face.

“Alright, you made your point,” Dean grumbled quietly.

Cas watched as Dean took another small spoon of his stroganoff. “I appreciate the care, Dean. But in this instance, it’s important that you, Sam, and Kevin eat.”

“And we all have,” Dean said quietly. “Look, I understand what you’re saying. I do. But will you at least take half of mine? I won’t give Sam or Kevin any less, but you can finish mine. You’re important too, Cas.”

A strange look drifted quickly across Castiel’s face, but Dean couldn’t place it. They looked at each other for a moment—or perhaps longer than a moment, with Cas, it was always hard for Dean to tell how long they’d been looking at each other—and Cas’s shoulders slowly softened.

“Alright,” he said quietly. “As long as you’ve eaten your fill. If it will put your mind at rest.”

Dean could eat more, but he wasn’t about to say so. Instead, he smiled indulgently at Cas, passing over the steel camping bowl and spoon. He was about to grab one of the other spoons for Cas, but the angel merely picked up Deans, not having any particular qualms about sharing. He took a bite, chewing thoughtfully.

“Perhaps, just this once, it’s a good thing that most things taste the same to me. This isn’t bad. It certainly isn’t good, but it tastes no worse than anything else.”

Dean smiled, watching Cas quietly as he dug in, scraping his spoon around the bottom of the bowl within a couple of minutes.

“Guess you were hungry, huh?”

As he finished up, he looked back up at Dean and caught him watching. It was getting a little too dark to see the details of what Cas’s face was doing, but Dean could have sworn there was a little embarrassment in Cas’s smile.

“Yes, I suppose I was. But unlike you, I won’t suffer in the same ways from it.”

“Even so.” Dean shrugged, gathering the bowl back from Cas and handing it over to Kevin, who had stood and grabbed all the dishes to clean out with some snow. “We’ll make our food stretch out as much as we can, just in case. But I’ll share with you when you’re hungry, buddy…”

Dean struggled to keep his voice even, memories and feelings he didn’t want surging up and punching him hard in the sternum.

“I don’t ever want to think about you going hungry again, Cas, okay? I just don’t.”

Castiel gave a tiny nod but otherwise didn’t respond.

Sam, though, seemed to sense the tension as he chose that moment to stand up, stretching out his spine and emitting some awful cracking noises that made everybody cringe.

“It’s been a long day. And after that cabin, I’m kinda glad to be sleeping in a tent, tonight.”

Kevin let out a dark-sounding huff of agreement.

“How’re we splitting the tents up?” Sam asked.

Dean could feel Sam’s gaze resting on him, but he focused on the dwindling fire, shrugging nonchalantly. “However, dude. I don’t care.”

“I would prefer to share with Dean,” Cas spoke up, with none of Dean’s faked casualness.

 _Oh_ , thought Dean, glad of the dim light to disguise his heating cheeks. _Cas doesn’t mean it like I do,_ he cautioned himself. _Stop it._

Sam smirked, nodded, and moved off to the tent nearest to him. “Figured. Night, guys.”

Cas turned to Dean like he was going to say something, but Dean suddenly found that he didn’t want to hear whatever it was. He pushed himself up off the tarp as swiftly as his bad leg allowed him too.

“Dean, I—” Cas’s voice was apologetic, but Dean was already unzipping the tent.

“You need to sleep just like you needed to eat, okay. Fold up the tarp when you’re done, and don’t forget to do up the zipper on the way in.”

Dean wasted no time getting himself settled inside the tiny two-man tent. It was far from spacious, as they were much more concerned with the weight they had to carry than whether any of them would be uncomfortable inadvertently sharing body heat as the night wore on. With the weather as it was, the sharing body heat was probably an advantage to the tiny tents, if anything.

 _Should have spoken up and shared with Sam, damn it,_ Dean told himself, though he knew in the very next breath that sharing with his brother was the last thing he wanted to do, despite having shared beds and cars and tents many, many times over their collective decades.

No, Dean _wanted_ to share with Cas, and that was the problem.

He didn’t have the nightmarish terror vibrating through his bones that he’d had the previous night when he’d come back in from the snow and practically asked Cas for cuddles; though at least he’d managed to refrain from actually saying it.

Cas hadn’t seemed bothered; had seemed comfortable, even, and that was the worst part. Because he was sure if he asked Cas if he could sleep in his arms again, Cas would let him.

But it wouldn’t mean the same to him, and that was the kicker.

Dean shuffled himself down into the sleeping bag, spread out on his side with his head resting on his arm. He should have changed the dressings on his chest, he should have found something to roll and use as a pillow, but he did none of those things. He merely lay in the dark, alone, like a coward.

Eventually, he heard Kevin and Cas bid each other good night, and some sounds much like the folding of the large, plastic-y tarps that they were now so grateful they’d thought to bring along. The fading, flickering firelight outside of the tent threw odd, jumping shadows into the tent, a dull orange glow making its way through the fabric wall, but not really illuminating anything within. Digging around inside his rucksack with one hand, Dean dragged out a torch. He folded up his warm hiking jacket, like Cas had done with his trench coat the night before, and plopped it down where his head would go. Leaving the torch lit, he turned it away from himself so that it shone on the back wall of the tent; brightening the space subtly with a dim, yellowish glow, rather than sharply blinding him.

Once he was done, Dean settled back down. Cas was still outside. Dean had no idea what the angel was doing, or thinking, out there in the snow alone. He just waited while the fire dwindled slowly further—at least another half an hour, Dean roughly guessed—until the tent zipper rustled.

Like a child at risk of being caught awake, Dean shut his eyes and screwed them up tight.

There was a rustling and shifting beside him, and Dean could hear the other sleeping bag being spread out. He was about to speak up and apologize to Cas for acting like a jerk. Any second. He really was.

“I’m sorry, Dean,” Cas said quietly into the chilly space of the slowly-warming tent, somewhere across from him. “It was inappropriate of me to suggest that we share, I see that now.”

Fabric rustled.

Dean opened his eyes. “No, man. It was fine. If you want to share, we’ll share.”

In front of him, Cas lay on his side, easing his feet down into the sleeping bag. It occurred to Dean with another painful stab that Cas must have learned about sleeping bags by himself, while he was sleeping on the streets. This wasn’t a new slumbering experience for him.

“It made you uncomfortable,” Cas noted. He didn’t meet Dean’s eyes as he zipped up the side of his sleeping bag, fully clothed in his usual dress pants and white shirt, though he had at least removed the hiking coat and tie.

Briefly, Dean squeezed his eyes back shut and took a breath. “Nah. It didn’t make me uncomfortable Cas, not in the way you think. I mean, I wouldn’t like to share with Sasquatch either, he takes up half the tent. And Kevin snores like a speeding freight train.”

Cas offered a tiny, low chuckle. “Indeed, he does. It’s a most unpleasant noise. But I would put up with it, or not sleep at all, Dean, if my presence here is… unpleasant, for you.”

Something in the way Cas said it immediately made Dean reach out across the foot or so of space between them. He grasped lightly at Cas’s wrist. “Please don’t think that.”

Cas sighed into his arm, bringing it up to rest his face on much as Dean had earlier done. “Well what am I supposed to think, Dean? You’re so hot and cold with me. Just when I think I’m getting the hang of understanding things, of understanding you, you change the rules on me.”

Dean’s heart beat once in his chest before scuttering away down to his stomach, sitting like a stone behind his belly button, a bezoar of self-inflicted angst.

“I’m sorry, Cas,” he whispered.

“What for?”

Well, wasn’t that the question. Dean dared to look back up, though he began to let go of Cas’s wrist slowly, guilt eating at him. “Confusing you, I guess.”

Before Dean could tuck his hand back into his sleeping bag, Cas’s hand darted out like it was in a panic, and grabbed at Dean’s arm. Slowly, his hand slid down Dean’s forearm to his palm, and then somehow they were holding hands, their fingers just resting on the floor of the tent between them.

Too late, Dean realized that neither of them was breathing.

While that wasn’t a problem for Cas, it certainly was for Dean, and he sucked in a large, shuddering gasp.

At the sound, Cas’s fingers began to relax and pull back, cautious, but Dean squeezed them tighter.

Dean watched their entwined fingers for a moment, the way they twisted between each other’s, his skin just a little paler than Cas’s, but both slightly tan from years spent outside, hunting. Their hands fit together well, Dean thought, as much as that was an odd thing to consider. He drew his attention up from them slowly, reluctantly, just wanting to check in on Cas’s face to see what he was doing. See how he was feeling, if he was mad, or confused… or worse, not confused at all, and horrified.

The heavy blue stare he received was none of those things. Cas’s irises were almost navy in the very dim light, the night outside now as dark as the full moon would allow it to be and nothing but Dean’s small torch illuminating the tent within. But Cas’s eyes rested on Dean unerringly regardless, and slowly he parted his lips.

Helpless to do anything else, Dean watched as Cas’s tongue slowly slid along his bottom lip, moistening it before he spoke. When he did, it was practically a whisper, a low rumble in the angel’s eternally gravelly timbre.

“I’m not confused, Dean, not at all. If that helps.”

And oh God, if that didn’t just make things a hundred times worse.

Dean could deal with Cas not understanding how Dean felt about him. Could deal with him not having the ability to care, all these years. Could deal with him just not knowing, with it never coming up. Could probably even deal with the kind of gentle, considerate rejection he knew Cas would give. But what he couldn’t deal with was the idea that maybe, just maybe, Cas wanted him too.

Not after everything he’d done; not after how he’d lied to Cas. Kicked him out of the bunker, hidden everything from him, and then gone straight and called for his assistance as if he had any right to, the second something came up where he needed an angel’s help.

He was ashamed and disgusted with himself.

And if Cas did, by some crazy miracle, feel even half of what he felt, about him?

Then there was no way on this Earth, or Heaven, or Purgatory, that Dean could deserve that.

Dean blinked, suddenly embarrassed to realize that tears were pickling at the back of his eyeballs. He pushed them away and avoided Cas’s gaze. The angel was close, so close, that Dean could feel his irregular, unnecessary breaths against his face if he turned to face him head-on.

“Dean,” Cas said, something in the word that Dean couldn’t place.

He turned his face back to Cas, trying to make sense of his expression, and found Cas _right there_ ; the small tent guiding Cas so close to him that their noses brushed as his head moved.

Dean opened his mouth to apologize for it, but nothing came out.

Cas’s lips parted in turn, and his fascinating tongue dipped out to moisten them again before he pulled his bottom lip almost imperceptibly through his teeth. If he hadn’t been watching, Dean would have missed it, but he was, so instead, he let his eyes rest on the gentle roll of Cas’s large, dry-looking lip under his incisors.

“Dean…” Cas said again; trying to get Dean’s attention, Dean knew, but it was a struggle to look away from Cas’s plush mouth.

But he did, his eyes drifting up Cas’s handsome, stubbled jaw to his eyes.

They stared for a long moment, and when Cas’s face tilted just fractionally, a hope scattered on his features that to Dean was utterly terrifying, their eyes remained locked.

Dean couldn’t blink, couldn’t breathe, as he felt the touch of Cas’s nose again, his skin ghosting across Dean’s own to his cheek, the tiniest, softest of nuzzles. A plausible deniability nuzzle. A fearful nuzzle.

Dean drew in a breath and brought himself forward just a fraction too. He didn’t know if he was reading any of this right or if it was just some Jötunn dream, or worse, fevered imaginings from years of pining which seemed to have come to a head—amusingly—here amongst the pines in Minnesota.

Dean moistened his lips, and he saw Cas’s gaze dip to follow the movement of his mouth.

A deep, drawn-out scream split the forest air.

Dean and Cas sprang apart like they’d be caught with their fingers in Pandora’s box, and scrambled for the tent door.

As Dean and Castiel crashed into each other, squeezing frantically through the flap of their tiny, two-man tent, the small clearing that they had pitched it in filled up with noise.

“KEVIN!” Sam’s voice, frantic and desperate, hit their ears first.

Trees crashed; a high-pitched scream of absolute terror bounced off the branches, heading further away from them. Another noise, unbearably unnerving but familiar to Dean, echoed around the forest repeatedly—a roaring, horrific sound that was part ice cracking and part sadistic yell. Like a glacier screaming, the sound reverberated around their small campsite.

It made an involuntary shudder run through Dean’s spine.

Cas had managed to keep enough wits about him to grab Dean’s torch, and he swung it wildly around, his wide eyes meeting Dean’s.

Sam emerged from the other two-man tent, or what was left of it.

The sweep of the torch that Cas held caused Dean to heave in a breath and try not to sob: the tent had collapsed entirely in on one side, into a lumpy mess of nylon and gray ropes. Much of the side had been wholly torn away; the jagged white netting that made up the inner compartment was exposed to the air, matching yet incongruous with all the snow around it. Around the rough edges of the outer skin of the tent, something gleamed in a series of long streaks and clots, and even small pools. Cas’s hand trembled as he focused the torch on the liquid, the beam of weak yellowish light shaking about the heavy stains on the destroyed fabric. They were bright red in color: oxygenated blood.

The fabric flapped in the breeze, the side of the tent where the prophet had slept now shreds, a giant hole allowing the softly falling snow, their eternal companion, to begin to creep its way inside.

Sam was shaking, trembling frantically as Dean and Cas rushed toward him, sweeping his torch around much as Cas was.

“It just grabbed him; I didn’t see it, I didn’t see anything, one second I was asleep and then—KEVIN!” Sam yelled as he ran, following what Dean and Cas could now see was a clear path of fallen, destroyed trees leading away from their camp.

Without any further discussion, they took off in pursuit.

 


	6. Chapter 6

The dark, tumultuous sky birthed weak, pre-dawn light across the bowing, snow-laden treetops. Dean, Sam, and Cas trudged through the snow, ill-prepared and ill-tempered.

Luckily, Dean supposed, his tent had been too cold to worry about taking off even his boots when he’d crawled into his sleeping bag earlier; he was fully dressed, though he desperately needed his coat and gloves in the falling snow. He was in a better state than Cas at least, who was now stalking through the forest with a foul expression, no shoes, and merely a white dress shirt and pants. Sam was dressed much like Dean, but the beanie he’d decided to sleep in was at least helping keep his princess hair free of snow.

They had been walking—in circles, they assumed—all night.

Initially, after they’d run out of their campsite to chase whatever had taken Kevin, they’d sprinted and jogged and called out his name for as long as they could. But the sound of crashing trees and tearing, screaming ice had faded into the distance, and almost simultaneously, they had stumbled to a halt.

Dean had bent over, breathless, and when he’d straightened, he’d seen Sam staring back behind them, his mouth open in a helpless ‘o.’

The trail they’d run along—not a walking path, but the tear in the trees created by whatever giant, horrific beast had grabbed Kevin from the tent—was gone. There were no fallen trees behind them, no destroyed foliage and churned up snow; everything was pristine.

They’d turned immediately of course, and started heading back the way they came.

It was futile; they hadn’t even needed to say it to each other; they all knew: They were lost. They could be anywhere. The Jötunn had them, running in circles in a world that worked entirely by its own whims. This reality didn’t belong to them.

God, they’d been so foolish. They were all pathetic; getting drawn out from camp and lost like a bunch of amateurs. But what else could they do but chase Kevin’s heart-wrenching, terrified screams?

He’d called their names, desperate, until the sounds had devolved into a long, soundless yell of fear, over and over, until it faded into the distance.

Dean’s stomach churned as he thought of it, the prophet begging for their help, begging to be saved, and probably not even knowing that they were trying.

_I insisted we came here._

_We could all die out here. Kevin is probably already—_

_This is my fault._

Cas’s hand came up to Dean’s shoulder. “Dean,” he said quietly. “We need to regroup, plan, work this out together. We can’t just keep walking in circles.”

Dean nodded and whistled up ahead to where Sam was shuffling through the snow, his hands under his armpits. He began to make his way back toward them.

“Cas,” Dean said quietly, looking him up and down with concern. “You’re shivering. You don’t even have any shoes—”

“I’ll be fine, Dean. I’m much more concerned about you.”

Dean wasn’t conscious having taken a step forward, but there he was, right next to Cas again. “Buddy, you can’t keep going like this, in the snow, it’s dangerous.”

“It’s much more dangerous to you, Dean. I’m extremely cold, yes, but I don’t think the cold can kill me. It certainly can kill you and Sam, however.”

“But—” Dean had barely begun his objection when Cas interrupted again.

“Do you know what happens to a human that gets too cold, Dean? You’ll get clumsy. Apathetic. Your decision-making capabilities will be greatly diminished. Then you—”

“I know, Cas,” Dean said quietly, interrupting the angel’s little rant and reaching for his hands. “I’m not saying it isn’t dangerous for us, Cas. Only that I don’t want you to be cold either. You’re wearing a thin shirt, and dress pants, and your grace isn’t what it normally is. I’m allowed to worry about you, okay? It’s kinda what I do.”

Cas winced slightly as Dean grasped his icy, stiff hands. Dean could see how uncomfortable Cas was, and he genuinely was concerned that Cas was running the risk of losing some of his vessel’s toes at this rate. Cas smiled almost apologetically, just a small quirk at one corner of his mouth, and nodded.

“It’s what I do too, Dean. We need some kind of plan.”

Dean nodded, and in a burst of bravery pulled Cas’s icicle hands upwards and stuck them under his arms, between his t-shirt and his thick, outer plaid shirt. Cas’s eyes widened, but he didn’t say anything, merely flexing his fingers across Dean’s ribs and stepping a little closer, pressing up to Dean’s front.

As Sam crunched across the snow and paused next to Dean, Dean lifted his arms to wrap around Cas, sharing the little body heat he had with his angel.

Sam raised an eyebrow, but when Dean raised his in turn, he merely smiled.

“It’s cold,” Dean said, that excuse being the hill he’d die on. “You want in on this Sammy? Group hugs, body heat?”

Sam gave a little snort, retucking his hands under his armpits and stamping his feet. “I’m good. You two enjoy your cuddles. I guess just walking isn’t doing us any favors—I’m going to look around, see if I can find any kind of little trail, a rabbit path or deer run, anything at all. It might lead to water if we’re lucky.”

Dean nodded, the side of his face brushing lightly against Cas’s cheekbone.        

Sam turned his eyes to Cas, then, not mentioning the fact that for that moment, looking at Cas was essentially the same as looking at Dean. “Do you think the Jötunn is trying to kill us? Is this all him—the temperature, the snow, everything?”

“Well, he is an ice giant,” Cas mused, shivering against Dean’s sternum. “It’s easy to believe that this freak snowstorm is his doing. But I don’t understand why he would want us dead or be targeting Kevin and Dean in particular—Jötunn aren’t like wendigo or other creatures in these environments, they don’t kill to feed. It wants something else from us.”

“Do you think Kevin is…” Sam trailed off, and they all looked at each other, helpless, not wanting to voice the obvious.

“Without understanding the Jotunn’s motives, we are at a loss,” Cas confessed quietly. “We have no idea of its endgame or how taking Kevin plays into it.”

“Well, all he’s gonna end up with,” Dean grumbled, “is us frozen to death, at this rate.”

And that was it.

As soon as the words came out of Dean’s mouth, the constant wind that had been making the trees creak all night began to die down.

A scraping howl of ice and anger echoed throughout the forest, a long screech like two ice flows moving opposite ways against each other. It was a sound eerie enough to freeze a man’s heart solid, and even Cas looked disturbed by it.

But, as the scream echoed between the trees and fell away, the wind stopped.

The flurries of snow began to peter out, becoming just a handful of soft flakes on the breeze. Without the noise of the wind, the forest was eerily calm.

Dean, Sam, and Cas all stood stock still, Dean and Cas still wrapped in their awkward, heat-sharing not-cuddle, and looked at each other.

“Did it just—” Dean began, but Sam cut him off immediately with a raised finger.

“Let’s not even say it,” Sam said. “Let’s just get moving. If we want to stay warm, we gotta move.”

Sam turned and began trudging through the snow once more, the compacted flakes beneath his feet squeaking in between the quiet trees as he looked around, searching for a trail.

Slowly, Dean began to unwrap his arms from around Cas. The angel was so solid against his chest, smelling so distinctly of fresh air after the rain, and slowly greening copper, and warm, dusty feathers. Dean found himself subtly huffing in a long inhale, committing the scent to memory, in case this was as close as he ever got to it.

“I’m sorry,” Dean whispered, just for the two of them. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, or anything. I just wanted you to be warm.”

Cas’s tiny, smiling shrug as he pulled back, tucking his hands under his armpits much as Sam had done, was a huge relief for Dean.

“It’s fine, Dean. Sharing body heat is wise. And I… well, I enjoy—” Cas eyes were downturned, examining the snow with a shyness that the usually stoic angel didn’t often display. Unfortunately for Dean, his words were cut off by Sam calling them.

“Guys! Up here! Look!”

Dean and Cas hustled as fast as they can to where Sam stood, between two white paper birch trees. He pointed to some trampled saplings, and then a few taller yearling trees that were trying to make a home near the birches. Their bark was stripped away, the pale underside of the trees exposed to the cold.

“Deer do that,” Cas said, nodding. “Well spotted, Sam.”

“So this”—Sam indicated a barely visible pathway that twisted out ahead of where they stood, between the trees, barely a depression in the snow unless you knew what you were looking for—“is likely a natural trail that animals frequently used. It might not lead anywhere. But it’s gotta be better than walking blind.”

They all nodded. Hands fisted against the cold air, cheeks ruddy and bitten by the chill, they bowed their heads and hunched their shoulders, and began walking.

Searching for a way out, just as much as they were desperately searching for Kevin.

And then they found him.

The sun had risen by then, making their path clearer to navigate even if the forest didn’t feel any lighter.

Cas was ahead, and weak or not his reactions were much quicker than Dean’s or Sam’s. He turned swiftly and shouted, “Don’t look! Don’t look!” as if he were protecting children from a horrific sight, which of course made Sam and Dean look up, like children.

Sam fell against the nearest available tree trunk. “God—Oh God,” he shouted into the damp, puffy air.

Without a sound, Dean walked away through the trees, back the way they had just been walking. After twenty feet he stopped, shaking, unable to go further. He bent at the waist and threw up into the snow.

Last night’s stroganoff didn’t make for appetizing viewing the second time around, and it burned his throat and nose as he choked, falling to his knees. After another few seconds of painful, uncontrollable vomiting, Cas’s hand was at the back of his neck, cold, but still somehow soothing.

“It’s not your fault, Dean, none of this is your fault.”

Cas knew exactly what Dean needed to hear, of course, he always did; but the words couldn’t stop Dean from turning in the snow, drawn like a magnet to look back at the body of the prophet above them.

Kevin was hanging from the branches in the same way he had found the deer in the trees, two days before.

His feet dangled just up out of their reach. His expression was one of mild surprise, his face ashen without so much as a suggestion of life, gazing out into the middle distance as if something had merely caught his eye and made him stare, distractedly. Nothing much of his torso had survived the attack; he was impaled on a thick branch, arranged as if crucified and positioned to face them as they came stumbling and panting through the trees.

There was no sign of Kevin’s clothes, his body split down the center and flayed open, brownish with blood and whitish with bone where odd slashes and puncture wounds scattered his body. His skin was pulled taught, pinned by twigs, not just impaled by the branches, but displayed upon them.

Dean felt his body twitching, ice-cold spasms in his face and shoulders as he shook, pinned between the snow at his knees and Cas’s chilled touch. Something in the coolness of the air around him as he looked up at the carcass of his charge, his friend, in the tree above cleared his mind.

His thoughts were suddenly crystal, and one hit him like a blow to the face: how did the Jötunn know they would pass this way?

For hours after running from the camp they had followed the most obvious routes, down through the forest, following what noises they heard, calling Kevin’s name through the dark. When they had lost him they had been directed by convenience through the spaces between thick, towering pines and spruce, and the guide of the forest floor itself and the clues it presented, to this very spot.

The snow beneath Kevin was quite clean. Barely any dripping blood covered it.

Which meant that they were being watched and that Kevin’s body had been hastily erected in the tree and exhibited only minutes before their arrival at this terrible place: a horrific gift presented to them by something with great strength, that could either climb or towered above them in height.

Dean stared up at Kevin, breath and blood so loud in his skull that he fought to hear his voice. “He was put here for us to find. Just now. It’s watching us.”

A few long seconds passed while that sunk in, Dean watching Sam and Cas as they took in Kevin’s state, and the ground below him. With slow nods, they agreed.

Sam slowly rose from his spot against the tree trunk, pale and sorrowful looking.

“We have to—we’ve got to get him down somehow.”

Dean nodded in agreement. “We can’t leave him there. Can’t reach him though.”

Cas’s sigh was every bit as reluctant and resigned as Dean found himself. “Find me a stick. I’ll do it.”

Dean and Sam, it turned out, couldn’t let Cas do it alone. As much as it was horrific—the smell alone enough to turn even a seasoned hunter—that was Kevin. He wasn’t just a prophet; he wasn’t just the key to the tablets. They didn’t have him in the bunker just to protect him from Crowley, or the angels or whatever other flavor of the week wanted a piece of Tran. He was there because he was family, and they protected their own.

The snow had stopped falling, and the forest warmed slightly, but the temperature was still a secondary constant danger. It bit at their exposed skin as they worked to get Kevin down from the tree, reminding them constantly that the Jötunn wasn’t all they had to fear.

With a final crack and sickening thump, Kevin’s body tumbled into the snow drifts beneath the tree.

As soon as it touched the ground, the air of the forest abounded with that same creaking, icy scream they’d heard twice before now, on the porch of the cabin and at the campsite in the night.

Dean and Cas both swiveled their entire bodies around, but they couldn’t find any particular spot in the trees to settle their vision on.

They remained frozen for a very long minute.

“I guess the Jötunn didn’t want us to get Kevin down,” Sam said quietly.

“Well, tough shit,” Dean bit, frustrated with this confusing monster who wouldn’t even let itself be seen. “I ain’t leaving him up there. If Gabriel’s great-great-grandkid has an issue, it can fucking come and face us and tell us what the hell it wants.”

Sam and Cas nodded silently by his side, all of them stuck with their eyes on Kevin as if they couldn’t bear to look away, either from the awful sight or from the last look they would likely ever have of their grumpy, pissy, determined little friend.

Dean fought down another wave of nausea. “A pyre would be dangerous here but… we should at least cover him with some branches or something.”

Sam nodded his agreement, jerkily. “Yeah. Something. Can’t just leave him in the snow.”

The bravest—or perhaps, over the millennia, the most desensitized—of them all, Cas slowly dragged Kevin to a flat piece of ground off the trail, under a leaning paper birch tree.

They were methodical as they gathered branches, ignoring their cold feet and gray hands, in favor of focusing on their friend, and what would have to stand for his last rites. It didn’t take them long to obscure him from view, a neat, woven pile of branches with a haphazard cross laid on top the best they could do for him.

Initially it was too hard to speak, but eventually, it was Sam that broke the silence.

“If we get out of here,” he mumbled, bringing his fingers up to the bridge of his nose, pinching as he fought back the tears, “one of us is going to have to call his mom.”

_Oh god._ Just the thought of facing Linda Tran and telling her that not only had they abandoned her for months, assuming that Crowley had killed her when he had not, but that they had gotten Kevin killed… That was too much. _Kevin is—was—exactly the sort of person that it’s my job to protect,_ Dean thought. _I failed. Again._

“Without you and Sam to protect him, Dean,” Cas spoke very quietly at his side, “the prophet would likely have been dead long ago.”

“I shouldn’t have brought him here. This—all of this—is my fault. I thought that coming here would—” Dean’s voice cracked, and Cas’s hand came over to grasp at his elbow, the angel turning to squint at him. “—I thought maybe I could fix some stuff, on this trip. Make some apologies, say some things that needed to be said, y’know? But I made everything worse, and now Kevin is—”

“Kevin is dead, yes,” Cas finished calmly, his squeeze at Dean’s arm a little tighter. “But you have to stop blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong, Dean. We all enter this life, this hunters’ life, knowing the risks. Knowing that there will be pain and loss, and sometimes lies. To protect people, to get what we need.”

Dean looked up, searching Cas’s face for the falsehood, but he found none.

“We choose it, Dean,” Cas continued, his blue eyes unmoving on Dean’s. “You are not to blame for everyone else’s choices. Mourn for your own if you must, but not for Kevin’s, or Sam’s, or mine. We carry the burden of those ourselves.”

“He’s right,” Sam spoke up quietly, his eyes fixed on the makeshift grave. “Kevin wouldn’t have made it this far without us. That doesn’t make this any less sad, but you can’t blame yourself for this one Dean. At some point, you’ve gotta stop and realize that even the mistakes that you made, you made them for a reason.”

Dean moved his gaze over to Sam.

“But that’s diff—” Dean started to say.

“A little forgiveness around here would go along way,” Sam said firmly. “You’ve been making all the effort to get _us_ to forgive you Dean, but you’ve gotta forgive yourself.”

Cas nodded along, agreeing, and Dean had to look down at the snow because it was too selfish a time for him to shed tears for himself when Kevin’s body was right there in front of them.

Dean cleared his throat awkwardly. “And what if I don’t deserve your forgiveness, huh?”

Cas’s icy fingers were firm as they lifted Dean’s chin, meeting his eyes with a determined, vivid blue. “You don’t get to decide that for us, Dean. Forgiveness is a gift, not a request.”

At that, a few tears finally betrayed him, but Cas didn’t seem to mind.

The angel’s hand came up as if he wanted to wipe away the salty droplets from Dean’s skin, but he hesitated, the pads of his fingers hovering a couple of inches away from Dean’s cheeks.

_Please, Cas,_ Dean thought helplessly. _Touch me. Comfort me. I need you._

Words he’d never say, but something must have shown in his face because Cas finally closed the small gap, smoothing away the tears from under Dean’s eye with his thumb.

With a soft clear of his throat, Sam stepped away, and Dean heard his boots crunching the snow as he made his way back to the little trail they’d been following when they’d come across Kevin.

Dean’s eyelids fluttered shut for just a moment, enjoying the ghost memory of Cas’s touch on his face, his callouses rough but his hands gentle. Even from behind his closed eyes, Dean could sense that Cas was about to say something important, and tension knotted his stomach in anticipation.

But instead, Castiel let out a soft, surprised noise.

When Dean opened his eyes, it was dark.

“Wha—” he said eloquently, blinking around.

Cas stepped away from him, frowning, their moment broken, as it always was. “I believe it is now dark.”

“Nicely observed, Captain Obvious. But why?”

Cas threw Dean a small glare. “Because the Jötunn wants it to be, I assume, as concerning as that may be. It seems he, uh—” Cas paused to point directly upward, to where the weak morning sun had been. “—he caused a full solar eclipse.”

“He can do that?” Dean blinked in astonishment, concerned. Just how powerful was this thing?

“Demigod-like powers, Dean, as I warned you,” Cas replied as if he could anticipate Dean’s thoughts.

Together, they turned and began to crunch across the snow, squinting in the dark. Cas pulled Dean’s camping torch from his back pocket, and they followed the small beam down to the trail where Sam waited.

“We should try to make a fire,” Sam said as soon as they arrived. “We need to get warm before we end up in serious trouble, and that way at least we can melt some snow and have some warm water to drink.”

They were all in agreement and began searching around for what small amount of dried leaves and pine-needles they could find amongst the trees. Making a fire this way was a pain in the ass, but Dean had done it many times before, as had Sam.

“I’m getting pretty sick of being constantly one step behind this thing,” Dean grumbled as he watched Sam spin a twig between his palms, grinding down into another as he tried to create enough friction for a spark.

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “Why does he want it to be dark? That’s the first thing to work out.”

Dean hummed thoughtfully. What could they do in the dark that would be harder during the day? What would the dark make them do, as opposed to the daylight? He looked around at the black shapes that made up the silent, dark forest, but nothing presented itself. Cas, though, seemed to have been thinking along the same lines.

“Light is more noticeable in the dark,” he said, wiggling the torch as if to demonstrate.

“So… if there was some kind of light out there,” Sam said slowly, nodding toward Cas, “somewhere that the Jötunn wanted us to go—”

“We’d be able to pick it out in the distance much easier than during the day,” Dean finished.

They all looked at each other, nodding in harmony. They may still be a step behind, but at least they could get an idea of which direction they were going.

 

Blackness pulled at Dean, the deep dark of the forest blurring the edges of his senses even with the torch he had his stiff fingers settled around. Most forests had some noise at night; the odd owl, the rustling of nocturnal rodents and the predators that hunted them. Northwest Angle State Forest—or at least, the magic-warped version of it that they inhabited—had none of those sounds. Just a heavy, deadly silence.

Walking tired Dean easily from putting most of his weight on his one good leg, but fuck if he was letting his weary little brother and the angel with no shoes trudge through the snow. He’d left them around the fire, thawing themselves out and warming water, while he hiked up to the top of the nearest hill.

His torch, and the campfire back below him were the only sources of light in the uncomfortable, sudden dark that the blocking out of the sun allowed. Dean swept the torch methodically across the ground in front of him, keeping an eye out for rocks and jutting tree roots amongst the snowy bracken.

A soft breeze shushed through the branches around him like an impatient breath, just waiting for him to get to the top of the ridge, where, he was praying and hoping, he’d be able to look out over the forest like he had before—this time, with the hope of seeing even the tiniest twinkle of light.

Their hiking packs were long gone, lost along with the tents, and coats, and food at the camp they had spent the previous night in. Hunger and cold were only serving to lower Dean’s mood even further from where it had been since the moment Kevin had been taken. Finding his body had only dropped it even lower.

Away from Sam and Cas, Dean allowed his shoulders to sag, didn’t worry about looking tough or determined or any other bullshit thing. He shivered, and slow, ignored tears slid down his face.

This trip was a nightmare. Dangerous weather, horrific unknown god creatures, potential starvation. He was in pain; His knee had swollen even further since their ill-advised run through the trees after Kevin had been taken, and the puncture wounds at his chest likely deeply infected by now—or so he figured from the burning, stinging sensation that pulled across his sternum. He didn’t have time to care. Every hour they spent out here, cold and hungry, was another hour where their options slimmed down to very narrow choices: Death by Jötunn, death by hypothermia, or death by starvation.

He needed to get back to the fire. To check on Sam and Cas.

Cas.

The angel had been the only source of the few light, warm-feeling moments that he’d had on this trip. Maybe now wasn’t the time to dwell on what it meant, maybe now wasn’t the time to wonder if Cas, now more familiar with human emotion, could ever return Dean’s feelings. Or, perhaps now was the only time he’d have. His feet were so cold he couldn’t feel his toes. His fingers were stiff and purple, and more worryingly, he’d stopped caring.

The top of the ridge, at least, brought some distraction from his thoughts.

Dean emerged between two tamarack trees, a relieved huff of air passing from between his lips as he crested the hill, which dropped off steeply before him. Out ahead of him was a deep, tree-filled valley; he knew it, but his torch showed him none of it, unable to penetrate that far. Only the shadow-box skeletons of trees on the horizon of the navy sky showed him where the world’s edges were.

But.

Dean blinked a few times, his chest tightening in a crazy (or perhaps logical) fear that he couldn’t trust his own eyes.

There, in front of him, probably a couple of miles down from the ridge, there was a light.

Not one light even, but several—a small encampment of lights, a hamlet of lights. They shimmered and twisted in the way that views disturbed by smoke tended to; these lights were solid and yellow, up in the air—windows, perhaps—but down below, obscured by the thickness of the forest, there were bonfires, or torches, or something that was letting off steady, gentle smoke.

Sheer joy burst through his chest, and for the first time all day Dean barely felt his injuries, turning and bursting through the trees to get back to Sam and Cas.

Civilization. He’d found some kind of civilization—however primitive, however unfriendly, some form of light meant some form of life, and that meant warmth, and food, and possibly even safety.

His torch bobbed wildly in front of him, none of the features of the forest around Dean even registering as he ran the few minutes back down the hill. He wanted to cry out with excitement, but it seemed unwise, knowing that they could be being watched by the Jötunn at any moment. Instead, he hobbled as fast as his leg could carry him.

He split the tree line with his arrival and happily stumbled back toward the small fire that Sam had finally coaxed into being, where he’d left Cas thawing his terrifyingly blue feet and Sam breathing warm air into his weak lungs.

But they were no longer crouched next to the fire; instead, they stood back to back, in a pose that Dean knew far too well. The single torch Dean had left them with; the one Sam had held when they’d fled the camp, was fixed on a spot about twelve feet off the ground, not far from where Kevin had been impaled.

Without even checking, Dean knew that the spot was right above where they’d buried the kid.

“Sam? Cas?” Dean asked quietly, whispering automatically as he moved over to them.

Cas reached out and grabbed his wrist, pulling Dean in to stand back to back with them, not even looking at him.

“We heard something,” Sam said quietly. “In the trees. Something crashed like a tree falling; we thought it was the weight of the snow, y’know, then—”

“Then what?” Dean asked fearfully.

“It was breathing. Whatever it was,” Cas whispered, “it was breathing.”

 


	7. Chapter 7

Everything was still.

If the creature was out there, it was holding its breath. Dean certainly was, and he could feel Sam’s tense shoulder next to him, totally immobile as if he was too.

Dean lost track of time in the dark as they all stood, torches up as if they were some kind of protection. They didn’t have a single gun or blade between them, roused as they had been from camp in the middle of the night, and right then that seemed more foolish of them than anything.

Cas still held on to Dean’s wrist. They didn’t mention it, and Dean carefully didn’t move his hand, fearful that reminding Cas of their one small point of contact would make him withdraw it. He looked down at it for a moment, Cas’s strong fingers across his skin, illuminated in the flickering orange light from the campfire.

Dean wanted to turn his hand, entwine their fingers like they had in the tent. But he did have some sense of timing, at least.

Eventually, he felt Sam’s shoulder slowly relax.

“It must have gone,” Sam whispered.

Like it had just been _waiting_ for one of them to dare to think it, the trees erupted with bouncing sound—an ethereal, splintering roar like the sound of a giant, incomprehensibly ancient glacier grinding against the Earth itself under pressure.

It was deafening and close.

While they were still reeling from the sudden onslaught of noise, the pine tree to their left toppled, creaking and tumbling over, ripping up the ground they stood on with its roots. Dean, Sam, and Cas all stumbled to their right, Dean reaching out for Sam instinctually, grabbing his arm just as Cas tightened his hold on Dean’s wrist.

The tree fell, carving a path through the forest away from them with the weight of its body.

Sam had his torch trained on the pine, but another resounding howl had him whip it over to the other side of the trail. Dean’s torch joined his, just in time to light up the makeshift branch-grave they had tried to honor Kevin with before it erupted in a shower of twigs and sawdust.

Like a ragdoll, Kevin’s naked, flayed body was yanked directly up in the air, disappearing into the treetops.

Silence fell.

Dean became aware that he was shaking; but as everyone else was too, it didn’t seem to matter.

“Holy shit,” breathed Sam.

“Indeed,” Cas agreed, his voice far too calm for the moment.

“What do we do?” hissed Sam in return. “We’re totally screwed here, guys. We’ve got no weapons; we can barely see, we—”

“Hey!” Dean interrupted firmly. “None of that. We think, and we plan, and we fight, and we outwit this thing.”

“How?” asked Sam, slowly moving his torch around overhead.

“I saw a village, or something like it when I was up on the hill. We just need to keep to the base of this hill, go around it, and then head a mile or two out into the valley. It’s well hidden, couldn’t see a thing during the day, but there is something there.”

“Do you think it will be safe?” whispered Cas.

Dean didn’t have a chance to answer.

The forest shook around them, snow showering down from the trees and thick clumps of it tumbling across the trail from where it had built up around tree trunks. Twigs snapped, and the pines swayed and hissed, a sudden wind bringing them sharply back to life.

Beyond the thick, gray clouds that were covering the forest, the sun began to let a little light through—something was happening, again. It wasn’t bright enough to see clearly, but the forest became full of jumping, shaking shadows as the creature bounded through it, in some kind of eerie, daytime twilight.

They could hear it; tearing back through the trees, coming at them directly.

The Jötunn was coming straight for them, this time.

In the torchlight, the three men shared a wide-eyed, fearful look before their instincts took over.

“RUN!” screamed Dean, and they did.

Everything around Dean was a blur. Pure adrenaline was the only explanation for the speed that all three of them managed to display as they raced through the trees, snow spraying out around their feet. They kept to the bottom of the hill, running along the bottom of it as Dean’s whispered directions had said.

But none of them were in a state to be chased. Dean could hear Sam wheezing at his side, the legacy of the trials and Gadreel’s reluctant expulsion weakening his lungs. On Dean’s other side, Cas fell behind, stumbling shoeless across the uneven floor—for one terrifying moment Dean lost track of him entirely, and he was about to turn on his heel and face down the Jötunn single handed for daring to touch his angel. But, before Dean could do something that stupid, Cas reappeared at his side, putting on another burst of speed.

The beast howled out its icy screams as it chased them, the vibrating sounds causing icicles to fall from high up in the canopy like crystalline spears that shattered around them as they ran.

“Keep running!” Cas yelled, and for a moment Dean felt a hand on the base of his back, pushing him forward.

Dean tried. He tried to run, tried to keep up. But his body rebelled at every step. He could hear the snapping of trees and slapping of wet snow getting closer behind him, the howl of the wind doing little to disguise it.

But he was in so much pain.

Shameless and too terrified to care, tears of agony wet Dean’s cheeks and he panted and huffed out loud, squeezing his eyes shut as if he could keep the pain out that way. He ran blind, guided by noise and the jostle of Sam on one side and Cas on his other.

But his leg as it was could only hold out so long.

With a strangled yell he fell forward; only to be caught, a strong arm around his waist, a hand grabbing his wrist again and pulling his arm up over shoulders.

Cas was dragging him, the crazy bastard; slowing himself down so that he could drag Dean through the forest, barefoot and panting in terror.

“Cas,” Dean wheezed, shaking his shoulders weakly. “Go. Get Sam, and go. I’m too slow…”

Cas ignored him. Cold sweat was leaking from Cas, gleaming in the dim, sunset-like light that the waning eclipse was bathing the forest in. Dean was convinced the Cas was only about as healthy as he was at that moment, but the stubborn angel wouldn’t even look at him, even less heed his arguments.

“We need to split up!” Sam yelled, somewhere to the left. “We’re a single target!”

A tree fell somewhere behind them, and the sound of hit seemed to push Cas to agree.

“Go!” he yelled. “Meet at the village, Sam!”

“Sam—” Dean called out weakly, increasingly unable to take a deep breath. But Sam was already tearing off through the trees, hoping to lead the Jotunn astray and confuse it.

Deans knee buckled again, and he stumbled into Cas’s side.

The angel tightened his grip around Dean’s waist and began a series of running leaps downhill, scattering snow and dragging Dean along with him, whether Dean wanted to go or not.

Dean’s feet barely touched the floor. He forgot, sometimes, exactly how strong the angel was, weakened or no.

The sound of crashing paused, and Dean wondered if the Jotunn had just realized that his prey had gone in two separate directions.

Using the moment to their advantage, Cas suddenly pulled Dean to the side, tucking them down into a depression in the ground behind a fallen tree, a small hidey-hole where they could lay low for a few precious seconds.

“Cas,” Dean panted. “You gotta go, man. I’m just slowing you down.”

“Don’t be stupid, Dean,” Cas said, moving around to Dean’s front, frowning.

Wheezing, pained, tears clinging to his cheekbones, Dean shook his head. “I can’t outrun that thing, dude. It’s gaining on us. Maybe you can leave me here and—”

Cas was on him in an instant, grabbing at his jaw, snarling, turning Dean’s face to his, forcibly. “I said _NO!_ ”

Their eyes locked solid, and Dean could feel the weight of Cas’s blue gaze like something physical, mere inches away. He moistened his lips, planning to say something, though he wasn’t sure what, even as he began to speak.

‘Cas, I—I just want you to be safe, okay, I need to know—"

“Dean Winchester, injured or not,” Cas growled, determined. “ _I am not going to leave you;_ do you understand?”

Dean barely had time to take a breath before Cas’s lips crashed into his.

It wasn’t how Dean had ever imagined it; no whispered endearments, or any chance of speaking his mind or taking this further—instead, this was desperation, and fear, and at least a little rage.

Dean saw Cas’s eyes widen as if just realizing what he’d done.

Dean was frozen still.

This was everything he wanted, but far, far from the way he wanted it.

Their teeth knocked, and there were too many tears and not enough breath between them for it to be a perfect, happy kiss. Even so, the feel of Castiel’s mouth against his own was everything, and it lit Dean up from the inside.

It was rushed, and inelegant, and rough, but it was enough. Dean registered that he should do something; kiss back, say something… but Cas's mouth was gone again before he had the chance.

_No, no! I can't have him think that_ —

Even just half the thought was enough to push Dean back up off the floor, link his fingers with Cas’s, and lurch back off through the trees, sprinting side-by-side.

Goddammit, he was going to live long enough for them to have some kind of conversation about what that meant.

Dean’s determination to find out what was behind that kiss only carried him so far, though. Before they reached the valley, his leg gave out again, and he stumbled, crashing to the ground before Cas could catch him.

“Dean!”

Cas was on him in a moment, frantic, rolling him onto his back. “We’re not going to make it with you like this, Dean.”

“I know that,” Dean croaked through the pain. “That’s what I’ve been saying; you’ve got to leave me behind, you’ve got to—”

“Enough!” Cas barked, command more than a request. The irritation and impatience etched into his frown were intense, and Dean found himself quietly cowed, best friend or not.

“I—” Dean didn’t get to finish.

Cas brought one hand up to Dean’s forehead as he lay amongst the snow, the other hand slid down Dean’s thigh to his knee in a movement that would have been intoxicating if it hadn’t been for the pain.

“I’m sorry, Dean,” Cas said quietly.

Dean felt Cas’s grace pour through him in a wave, even as the ground beneath his back began to shake, the Jötunn closing in on them with every second they wasted.

The forest around them illuminated blue-white as Dean glowed from the inside. He could feel every tiny thing that was happening to him; his ligaments sewing themselves back together, the tightness of his pants reducing as the swelling decreased, the skin of his knee itching as the bruising faded. The grace was warm. It felt like the very essence of Cas, somehow, and Dean briefly thought that he was certain he’d always be able to distinguish the grace of his angel from any other, by feel alone. The puncture wounds at his chest tingled as the closed up, the seeping, infected flesh that was stuck to the inside of his shirt loosening. Even the cold, the hunger, the dehydration—they all faded, and Dean was left feeling better than he had for months.

For a moment he floated, the feeling of Cas’s grace entwined within him a sweeter drug than he’d ever admit to anybody.

One look at Cas brought him sharply back down to the ground.

The angel swayed, glassy-eyed and weak, sweat trickling down his face as he collapsed down to the side, landing in the snow.

_Shit._ This was exactly what Dean was afraid of, the whole time.

“Cas!” Dean reached out, grabbing Cas’s shoulder to shake him. “Cas, you son of a bitch—”

“I’m fine,” Cas rasped, rolling over to his front and using both hands to push himself off the ground shakily. “We need to get moving.”

“You can hardly move, you dumb asshole! What the hell did you do that for?” Dean was brushing the snow from Cas’s shoulders as if he could somehow brush away his guilt.

Cas opened his mouth defensively, and Dean had the distinct feeling he was about to get a full dressing down from the Angel of the Lord. But he didn’t, and Cas’s mouth closed slowly, his eyes dropping. There was something hurt in them; something Dean didn’t understand.

Cas’s voice was clipped and tense as he pushed himself awkwardly back on his feet. “We have to run. And you’re welcome.”

Dean reached out, hauling Cas to his side. “We can argue about this later.”

They crashed onwards, Dean half-dragging Cas as they rounded the bottom of the hill, headed toward the valley. Dean could hear a secondary set of crashing far over to their left, and he hoped and prayed that it was Sam.

As the forest floor shook behind them, Dean became aware of heavy, panting sounds—like a huge beast huffing long, weary breaths.

The deafening noise of pursuit slowed.

Dean wanted so desperately to turn and look, but he knew better than to waste the precious seconds it would take. “It’s—it’s slowing down, Cas,” he panted, confused.

“Yes,” Cas observed weakly. “It’s stopping.”

Another look at the angel showed him to still be in poor shape, his face clammy and gleaming in the eerie half-light the Jötunn was allowing them. His hair stuck up at odd angles, his stubble looking darker against the paleness of his skin. Even worn, he was beautiful, and even if Dean had thought it a million times before over the years, it still surprised him, every time.

“Come on, buddy,” Dean coaxed, resettling his arm around Cas’s waist as they both struggled for breath. “Let’s hurry up and not look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Cas frowned, and initially Dean thought he was going to question Dean’s phrasing—a saying that Dean thought would be old enough for even Cas to have known—but instead, he raised a shaky hand and pointed ahead.

“I think that’s why it stopped.”

Dean and Cas both slowed their shaking steps. Ahead, amongst the trees, began a line of torches.

They were tall, taller than either of them. Straight poles with some kind of wrapping around the top that made the flames burn low and long. They didn’t give out a ton of light, no wonder Dean hadn’t seen them from the hill, but they provided a guide on through the forest, like safety lights on a runway.

An icy hand clutched Dean’s heart again. “The Jötunn was leading us here, wasn’t it? Herding us. Even when we thought we were escaping…”

Cas nodded slowly. “I agree,” he said, voice weak. “I think it could have easily caught us if it wanted to—the speed it grabbed Kevin at, I have no doubt it could have overtaken us.”

“What should we do?”

Cas gestured on down the path, beginning to walk wearily. “What choice do we really have?”

Dean walked silently beside him. Cas was right; he knew that. Between the snow-filled, warped forest where they’d as soon freeze as starve with no way out, and whatever lay ahead… the Jötunn had trapped them, possibly since the moment they left the Impala. He just didn’t understand why.

“What does it want, Cas?”

The angel turned his eyes onto Dean, Dean felt them, but he didn’t offer a response. He probably didn’t have one.

“Why Kevin? Why me? Why has it ignored Sam and you? What does it want from us?” Dean continued, rhetorically. “I just want some damn answers.”

The torches began to appear at more frequent intervals, and where they walked became a more defined trail, with a distinct path between the trees.

“Look, Dean,” Cas whispered, still walking with Dean’s support. “The snow is melting.”

And it was. Dean hadn’t noticed, but the more torches appeared, the closer they got to… wherever it was, the snow drifts were thinner. The air felt warmer, and wet drips could be heard all through the trees.

In the distance, Dean could see solid, straight-lined shapes amongst the trees. He raised a hand, pointing them out to Cas, silently. The angel nodded in return, and they limped on, quiet, and unbearably tense.

“Cas—” Dean started, wavering between _now is not the time_ and _now might be the only time._ “I’m sorry,” he decided on. “For yelling at you when you healed me.”

“I appreciate you saying so.” Cas sighed. “But I still feel that you don’t fully understand.”

“What is there to understand? I mean, it’s tactical, I was slowing us down. But I didn’t want you to risk yourself to heal me—”

“Tactical?” Cas’s laugh was bitter, and he pulled away from Dean’s side, limping ahead. “Then no, you don’t understand. You don’t understand a damn thing.”

“Hey—” Dean reached out, grabbing at Cas’s shoulder. Weakened, the angel wasn’t fast enough to dodge him. “What exactly don’t I understand, huh? Because I thought we’d been trying, Cas, to communicate, not to do this shit. But I still feel like I’m missing huge chunks, okay? And if I’m trying, then you need to as well, buddy—I can’t read your fucking mind, okay?”

Dean wasn’t sure why he was suddenly so angry, or why the sudden surprise and sadness in Cas’s expression punched him like a fist to the gut. But over Cas’s shoulder, something caught his eye.

“None of it is tactical, Dean,” Cas was saying, quietly. “Healing you, trying to comfort you—none of it is _tactical,_ the tactical thing to do would have been to send someone else on this ridiculous hunt.”

In the air, behind Cas, suspended in the branches at the side of the pathway, was a dark shape.

“I don’t want you to be in pain, Dean, it’s that simple—you mean too much to me. I don’t know if perhaps I’m not clear enough with my—Dean?”

It was Kevin.

“Dean?”

Swallowing hard, Dean pointed behind Cas and up, directing the angel’s gaze.

The prophet had been remounted on the tree, like a grotesque road marker on the path to the village. Splayed open, his skin stretched onto the branches around him until it was paper thin. But now, all across his flesh, tiny ice-blue runes glowed.

Kevin looked down at Dean, his eyes bulging, his tongue swollen.

Dean thought he might throw up again.

“Oh,” said Cas, his voice hopeless, just like Dean felt. “Should we…”

Dean shook his head, averting his eyes. “No point to take him down again, that just made it mad last time, I think.”

“Yes,” Cas agreed, nodding. “We should just hurry then, and find Sam.”

Dean found it hard to walk under the tree, past the bulging gaze of the kid he should have saved. So he moved to the other side of the path, almost childishly avoiding looking at the tree as if he could pretend this was just another one of his nightmares.

Cas limped alongside him, looking miserable.

It was, indeed, a small village. A hamlet perhaps, or an enclave, Dean wasn’t sure what difference it made or why it mattered—there were buildings, with primitive light and heat, and Dean could see small gardens, which hopefully meant food.

It appeared deserted.

All of the buildings were constructed from stripped pine planks, neat little square homes, and larger buildings with pitched roofs made of the same pine, something dark smeared across the roofs—he’d have guessed pine tar, but he wasn’t there to gauge the construction.

Dean had slipped his arm around Cas’s waist again a couple of hundred yards before they came across the entrance; two much larger torches, framing a gap in the erratic fencing that seemed to run around parts of the village, but not others. The floor was just mud. Nothing fancy, nothing modern. It was like something from a movie Dean had seen once, where there was a whole community of people leaving in the woods like pilgrims, right off the side of a highway.

The silence was spooky.

“Hello?” Dean called out, pausing to give Cas a chance to catch his breath.

The angel leaned on him heavily, looking around. “Clearly the space is in use; clothes are hanging outside some of the homes. They must all be inside, somewhere.”

Dean nodded, looking down at Cas. “Yeah. Should we head to the main building, or wait here and see if Sam shows up?”

As Dean mentioned waiting, a handful of snowflakes floated down, scattering across Cas’s face.

Cas screwed up his nose at the sensation, and Dean couldn’t help a low chuckle. He reached up, gently batting them off Cas’s cheeks with his fingers. “I guess that’s our answer.”

Dean couldn’t help but stare down at Cas as he dusted the snow from his cheekbones, his breath catching somewhere it probably shouldn’t have. But Cas dropped his gaze, looking downward.

“If the Jötunn wants us to go inside, then we should probably go inside before it starts up another blizzard,” Cas said, quiet and flat.

Dean dropped his hand, embarrassed. “Uh, yeah. Gonna have to play along until we work out what it wants.”

Cas moved ahead of him, and Dean was left with the distinct, uncomfortable impression that he’d somehow hurt Castiel’s feelings, that he’d missed something, again. _When we get out of here,_ Dean thought, _I am taking that guy to a liquor store and making him drink the entire thing until he talks._

Dean followed behind Cas as he headed to the main building, throwing looks around the encampment to check for Sam coming in behind them, and memorize as much as he could of their surroundings.

There seemed to be a larger building in the middle—some kind of community building, perhaps, surrounded by smaller homes and neatly divided up garden plots. Over the other side, there were larger barn-like buildings and Dean found himself wondering if there were animals there, though right then he could neither hear nor smell, anything to indicate there were. The fence they’d walked through didn’t seem to go the whole way around. There were vast stretches where the tree line came right up to the village, which seemed to indicate that the fence hadn’t been put up to protect them from anything, rather just to mark a boundary. In front of the large building, there was an open courtyard that had three large, thick poles erected in the middle of it. They were too thick to be flagpoles, and Dean’s mind raced with other, more worrying, ideas of what they could be for.

A movement in the trees made Dean’s stomach flip over—but it was Sam. Lurching wearily, he waved his arms to signal that he was okay, and began to make his way over toward them.

“Dean,” Cas called to him softly, indicating a side door to the main building. A small crack of light shone down the length of it from within—it was open, just a fraction.

Nodding, Dean moved into position.

Dean and Cas had hunted together so many times that simple moves like this required no discussion, as natural as walking. Dean went left, and Cas went right, one each side of the door. They rested their backs against the wall, and with a silent, eyes-only count to three, Dean pushed it open.

The room was empty.

“Hey guys,” Sam whispered, the sound of his boots squelching through the mud outside the door announcing his arrival before he spoke.

“Glad you made it,” Dean murmured back. “Looks like the big ice angel baby wants us to go inside.”

Sam raised an eyebrow but turned with Dean to peer through the entrance to the quiet building.

A fireplace burned in what appeared to be a kitchen; it was closed off, a thick iron fireguard blocking much of the light, so the room was bathed in flickering shadow. There were counters cluttered with pans and above them large hooks which displayed pots, bunches of drying herbs, and even salted slabs of meat. Dean tried not to let his eyes linger too long on what looked like a smoked side of bacon. There were several other doors, to other rooms or perhaps pantries, and a heavy, pine kitchen table. Everything was pine. There were a few chairs in the corner, and what Dean thought might be an honest-to-goodness, genuine spinning wheel.

_Perhaps I wasn’t so wrong with that pilgrim thing,_ Dean mused.

Cas was the first to step inside, his socks—by now completely torn to shreds and soaking wet—barely making a sound as he padded onto the wide, gray flagstones. Dean stepped quietly after him, looking around nervously, followed by Sam.

They all spun on their heels as the door clicked behind them.

Sam managed to shout out something—an incoherent noise, and Dean thought that he heard Cas yell his name.

Out of the corner of his eye, Dean saw the flat side of an archaic ax blade, gleaming in the flickering light from the kitchen fireplace.

_THUNK!_

Dean’s temple screamed, and everything went dark.

 


	8. Chapter 8

They were close.

Voices.

Footsteps.

People—no, a person, Dean decided. Just one. Talking to themselves.

A muttering that he couldn’t make out, outside the warm, heavy darkness that engulfed him. He sensed a presence over him and tried his best to open his eyes.

Silty light seeped through his half-closed eyelids and worsened the pain. Relentless in its encasement of his entire skull, the agony made him feel nauseous and bewildered, and unsure of where he was. His head and face and neck were wet and cold, dripping.

The shape of his head felt too big—ungainly and misshapen. Something wet hung over one eye and restricted the weak light even further.

He couldn’t move his hands. He wanted to reach up and touch the part of his temple where the pain started its thunder before it rolled on backward to encompass the rest of his head… but he didn’t have the reach. Instead, a throaty groan of complaint was all he could manage.

Dean swallowed against his dry and swollen throat. Water. He was desperate for it—how long had he been unconscious?

“Sam?” he croaked, desperately. “Cas?”

Forcing his eyes open against the hazy increase in pain, Dean squinted around.

He was in a square room. The floor was dirt, and the walls were pine planks, as everything in the village had been. The walls were dark and solid until about three-quarters of the way up, where daylight began to appear between the cracks; so he was in a basement, he deduced, below ground up until the last couple of feet before the ceiling. There were a few hatch-looking spaces at eye level and on up, like windows, but they were all shut tight. The gaps between the boards were the source of the dust-mote filled light beam that had hit Dean’s face when he first awoke. The only other light in the room came from a single-candle lantern.

The lantern was held by a woman. She was elderly—wizened. Dean couldn’t begin to guess her age beyond _very old._ Her hair was white, pulled up into a bun, and she wore a shabby old tunic, made of rough material and only given shape by a rope tied around the middle. Her arms and legs were slim, but wiry with muscle rather than from disuse. Her shoes were simple leather booties, like something from a renaissance fair.

She simply stood, at the bottom of a simple, banister-less staircase of pine, watching Dean wake.

Dean took her in, but didn’t speak; far more concerned with looking around the rest of the room. He appeared to be tied to a post; a square column that supported the roof, it seemed. His feet folded under him; he was slumped back against it. The ache in his neck told him that his head had been left to loll forward, for a long time.

A second post, on the other half of the room, restrained Sam. Looking over at his brother, conscious but silent, Dean felt a wave of relief. They exchanged a look; they were okay as much as they could be. Sam was tied roughly to the post by his hips and chest with thick rope, and then—just like Dean—his hands were pulled back to the other side of the post, stretched around it and held with handcuffs. The handcuffs were shiny, silver, and modern looking.

“Cas?” Dean called out again, a feeble croak.

There was no answer, but Sam nodded toward Dean, indicating slightly behind, and by wiggling his hands Dean was able to ascertain that the angel was bound to the other side of his post, more ropes and a second pair of handcuffs holding them back-to-back with the wooden column between them.

“You okay Cas?” Dean tried again.

No response.

The woman stepped forward, squinting hard at Dean as if something puzzled her.

“Who are you?” Dean forced out, past his sawdust tongue. “What do you want?”

She smiled a pale, papery smile and held up a finger, indicating that he should wait a moment. Taking a couple of steps back up the stairway, she called up, to someone unseen, her voice dusty and rough.

“Inge, _geef de uitverkorene wat water. Hij heeft dorst_.”

Dean couldn’t place the language she was speaking, beyond it being foreign to him and vaguely Nordic-sounding. Sam was the brain, but looking over at him told Dean that Sam wasn’t having much luck either. If only Cas were awake—he’d know.

“Cas?” Dean tried again quietly. He pulled against his handcuffs, twisting his wrists, straining to reach back and grasp a handful of angel. Squashed against the wooden post, Dean found a hand, limp and cold. He grasped it desperately, twining his fingers into it. “Cas? You gotta wake up buddy. Could use some help here…”

The elderly woman came back down the steps carrying a pewter cup, and as she turned and moved toward Dean, he noticed the heavy ax looped onto the tie at her waist, carried on her hip.

_Bitch._

She stepped over to him, nodding encouragingly as she raised the cup to his mouth, bending down to where he was still half curled against the post.

“Drink, _uitverkorene. Je moet gezond zijn, sterk zijn, voor onze meester.”_

Dean clamped his lips down tight. _Ain’t no way I’m drinking what you’re offering, hag._

With shockingly, inhumanly strong fingers, the old woman forced his jaw open and trickled some water past his lips.

“Stubborn American,” she grumbled. _“Hij is misschien gezegend door de meester, maar niet met hersenen.”_

Dean frowned. So she could speak English—at least enough to insult him, anyway.

“Who are you, old lady? What do you want with us?” Dean jerked his head to Sam and back, causing another wave of pain. He gritted his teeth and focused on the woman. “Him, and me, and the guy behind me. What do you want with us?”

She smiled patiently like she was looking at a child. “Not them,” she said. “Just you. You are strong one. _Je pijn trok hem aan, lokte hem als een baken, kind. Laat hem voor je zorgen._ ”

“English, lady. Why just me?”

She shook her head again, though her smile was less pleasant. She waved her hand at him, vaguely across his chest. “Marked,” she said. “Marked.”

Dean looked down, before realizing what she meant. “The wounds from the dream? The stab wounds? They’re gone, lady. Healed right away—I’m not marked for anything.”

With the hand which wasn’t holding the small cup of water, the old woman reached up to the neckline of her tunic. Yanking it down rather further than Dean had ever hoped to see on a woman that old, her parchment skin was pale and uninviting below the neckline.

On her chest were three old scars, perfectly round and eerily familiar.

With a smirk, she reached over and pulled hard on the neck of Dean’s shirt, the _rip_ sound of straining stitches accompanying the exposure of his much-less-papery chest.

_What the fuck._

Dean looked down. On his chest, in exactly the same spot that he had _felt_ Cas heal, felt his grace warming and knitting together, were three purple, ugly circles.

Dean was certain, to his core, that they hadn’t been there after Cas had healed him.

Were they coming back somehow?

“What the fuck, lady?” Dean croaked desperately. “I like this shirt.”

The elderly woman’s smile was vicious, then, something disturbing about it that didn’t meet her eyes. She parted her lips, about to respond, but she was interrupted by a low groan from behind Dean.

“Cas?!” Dean squeezed at the angel’s hand desperately. “Cas!”

“Dean?” Cas’s voice was even lower than usual, croaky and weak. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you? What is—”

“ _Inge! Die andere man is wakker! Roep Kees en Guus en zeg ze dat het mooie vriendje van de uitverkorene klaar is om voorbereid te worden en naar de kapel gebracht te worden.”_

Dean pulled against his ropes, twisting and writing with everything he had; but with his hands handcuffed back behind the thick post, there was little that he could do beyond cling on to Cas’s hand.

“What do you want!” Dean shouted at the woman; his anger overriding the pain in his head. “Why are we here?”

Cas’s hand was gripping him back, the best thing about the whole situation.

The woman straightened back up, letting go of Dean’s shirt so that she could force more water into his mouth, making him gargle and choke. Much of it ran down his front, soaking his t-shirt and one side of his plaid overshirt, but he darted out his tongue to moisten his lips as soon as she pulled back.

“Sam?” Dean turned his head, looking over at his brother, before looking back at the woman. “What about him? He needs water too.”

The woman shrugged, moving back toward the steps. “He nothing. Your pain strong.”

“What?!” croaked Sam, his eyes widening.

Every pine step was a deafening creak in the dim, underground room. She picked up the lantern on her way past, and the shadows grew longer as she moved toward the top of the staircase. A door creaked open at the top.

“Hey!” Dean yelled after her. “What the hell!”

But she was gone.

The basement darkened, only the thin lines of dusty light that glimmered between the pine boards at ceiling level lighting the dank space within. The room smelled of mud and dust and felt oddly humid compared to the cold outside.

For a moment, in the near dark, they were all quiet, waiting. As no one else appeared, they began to talk.

“You okay, Dean?” asked Sam.

“Yeah, good as I can be. You?”

“Been worse. Seems like you’re granny’s favorite, dude.”

“Yeah, I’ll pass. I don’t mind an age gap but hitting me with an ax isn’t great foreplay. Cas? You alright back there?” Dean asked, punctuating his question with a gentle hand squeeze; they hadn’t let go of each other, their entwined fingers being their only form of contact, positioned as they were with their backs to each other.

“Yes, Dean. I still feel weak from expending my grace, but other than a small head wound from whatever hit us, I am fine,” Cas reassured quietly.

“You finally let Cas heal you?”

Dean could see the outline of Sam’s princess-hair turned toward him in the dark.

“Not really. But it happened anyway, and I apologized for being a dick about it. Happy?”

Sam made a vaguely impressed noise, but let it go, and instead twisted his head further as if he was trying to look at the angel. “Hey, Cas—did you hear any of what she said? Can you work out what language she’s speaking?”

“I only heard the end of the conversation, what she said after I awoke. She was speaking Dutch.”

“Dutch?” asked Dean, baffled. “In the middle of Minnesota? Like… some kind of weird-ass, long-lost pilgrim colony?”

“I don’t think so,” Cas said quietly. Dean felt the ropes behind him move as if Cas was shifting uncomfortably. “From what she said, I believe that they are worshiping something. As the Jötunn is Norse in origin, it must have come from somewhere in northern Europe, though perhaps not as northerly as we thought. The Dutch could be ceremonial to them, from their ancestors, or something.”

“What did she say?” Sam asked.

Cas took a long, heavy moment to answer. “She called to someone to alert two others—Kees and Guus—that, uh… that I’m awake. They seem to think that Dean and I…”

Dean could almost _hear_ Cas blushing.

“…they think that I’m important to Dean,” he surmised finally, in a way that told Dean that was not at all what they had said.

“Riiiight…” said Sam, drawing out the word in a terribly accusing manner. “So, uh, did they say anything else?”

Dean was so glad it was dark.

“They—” Cas cleared his throat determinedly. “—they are going to take me to a chapel and ‘prepare’ me.”

Well if that wasn’t just the worst wording there could have been. Dean made a small, strangled noise, but luckily Sam talked over it.

“Take you and _prepare_ —woah, alright, we have to get out of here. There are zero possible meanings to that phrasing that I am comfortable sitting through.”

In the dim, dank air, Cas’s curious sounding response was the last straw. “I believe they wish to sacrifice me to the Jötunn, but what other meaning could—”

“Alright!” Dean interrupted, as loud as his cracked voice would allow. “We gotta get out of here and find some way to summon the Jötunn and kill it. A little focus, is that too much to ask?”

Cas and Sam both fell very quiet. In the dark, Dean became suddenly aware that Cas’s hand was still clasped in his, and he held his fingers artificially still, as if somehow Cas might not notice.

“I’ve been trying to get out of these ropes ever since they brought us in here,” Sam said quietly. “So far no luck. They’re tight, and with the cuffs behind the post…”

“Yeah,” agreed Dean quietly. He could feel Cas wiggling slightly behind him, as if he was testing his own bonds.

Before Cas could speak up, there was an ominous creak. A block of brightness appeared at the top of the narrow stairwell, illuminating the room a little with beigey light.

Dean looked over at Sam while he had the chance, reassuring himself that his brother was, while weak, mostly uninjured. He wished desperately that he could see Cas, and reassure himself that he was okay. The angel had been proven time over to not always be the best judge of when he was okay, in Dean’s opinion.

Two sets of footsteps clunked their way down the pine treads and onto the packed dirt floor. The two men—Kees and Guus, Dean assumed—made their way straight past Dean and on behind him.

He felt Cas’s jerks as he tried to shake their hands off through the ropes.

“Hey!” Dean yelled, as best he could. “Get your hands off of him!”

 _“Wat wil je van me? Wat wil de Jötunn van ons?”_ Cas snarled.

_“Stilte! Jij wordt een krachtig offer aan onze meester. Jij zult de pijn van de uitverkorene vormen, omdat hij zal vreselijk zal lijden als hij jou verliest!”_

“Cas!” Sam called.

Dean twisted angrily, desperate to help his angel. “Cas! What are they saying?!”

“The chosen one? You mean Dean? Chosen for what? I mean nothing to him—”

There was a sickening, wet cracking sound, and Cas fell silent.

“Cas!” Dean scrambled, kicking his heels wildly against the dirt floor, even though it achieved nothing. “CAS!”

The angel’s limp, unconscious form was dragged unceremoniously past Dean. The two men, careless, grabbed one foot each and hauled Cas with no care. Every pine step met Cas’s face with a grotesque, fleshy thud, and Dean thought he might throw up then and there.

“Leave him alone!” he screamed, but the men didn’t even turn, clicking the door shut behind them.

“Dean…” Sam called quietly. “I know what you’re thinking. Stop it.”

_If he hadn’t healed me, he wouldn’t have been so weak. They wouldn’t even have been able to knock him out. This is all my—_

“Dean!” Sam snapped roughly.

Dean slowly looked over to Sam. He knew that his guilt was written all over his face, he could feel it. His eyes burned in the dim light, and he was just glad that Sam couldn’t see the intricacies of his expression.

Listening to Sam struggle against his ropes, Dean slumped his head back against the post he was tired too, looking up at the beams of light peeking through the gaps in the planks near ceiling level. They were small, but bright; it was sometime in the afternoon, Dean decided. Not that knowing the time helped.

Above their heads, the floors of the primitive pine building creaked as people walked around, followed by a duller, dragging sound that make Dean’s stomach churn again.

A few minutes later the screaming began.

 

Sam had fallen asleep some time before, weary and dehydrated, tied to his post.

Dean was exhausted, his arms sore from being unnaturally extended behind his back, but he couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t close his ears to Castiel’s screams, as much as part of him wanted too.

He knew it took a lot to make the angel scream.

Time rolled on, and Dean quietly catalogued every noise. It didn’t sound like Cas was sitting back and taking whatever they were doing; there were frequent raised voices, glass smashing, more sickening thuds.

Dean was so intent on not missing a moment of Cas’s torture—as if, somehow, he deserved to experience it along with him—that he barely registered the door opening.

A pair of young, lean legs came sedately down the staircase, slowly turning into a small red headed woman as she descended. Her tunic wasn’t much improved on the old woman’s, but at least she wasn’t carrying an axe. She did have a lantern, though, a decent oil one which put out more light than Dean had seen in a while. He winced involuntarily, scowling against it.

“Who are you?” Dean said, fixing their newest visitor with a glare.

Dean heard Sam grunt awake at his words.

“My name is Inge,” she said calmly, moving toward Dean.

Unable to stop her, Dean merely scowled as she pulled down his shirt, checking on the markings at his chest. They were darker now, wetter looking, as if the wounds themselves were trying to open back up. She seemed satisfied with that, giving a small smile, before she spoke again.

“We are preparing you for great things. It’s an honor to be chosen.”

“Chosen for what?” Dean asked, thankful that this one spoke enough English that he might finally get information they could use.

“For peace,” she said, sounding the kind of happy that only really good drugs or really bad brainwashing can produce. “And immortality.”

“Peace,” Sam repeated, butting himself into the conversation. “What with all the murder and torture and all, you haven’t been very convincing on that front.”

Inge turned to regard Sam with a clinical, detached gaze. “Not for you. You are not chosen. The peace is only for the one who’s pain was so great that the master marked him.”

“The master,” Dean interrupted. “You mean the Jötunn?”

“Yes,” Inge inclined her head, smiling widely. “You know of him, then.”

“Remind me,” Dean said, his breath hitching tightly as he heard another terrific crash of glass from above.

“It is a myth, to many. But one we know as truth. Jotnar were created many eons ago, by Gods far beyond our comprehension.”

Dean snorted. _Yeah, Gabriel certainly is that._

“But our master is special, you see. He travelled on foot to the New World, back when he could walk the Bering Strait, because he could sense all the war, and pain, and suffering that was to come. He brings a great gift.”

“Oh?” Dean said hopefully, playing along. “And what would that be?”

She spoke again with an odd lilt, as if she was reciting. “The Gods sent a nameless beast to ease the suffering of the human realm, that the cries of guilt and sorrow could be quietened. He blesses those who need it most; with peace, and longevity. He will take their pain, their emotional turmoil, their endless guilt, in exchange for their eternal submission. Years of life! At peace!”

“Or?” called Sam, from his twin post. “There’s always an or.”

Her green eyes skittered over to him, resting briefly in his direction, though her response was to Dean. “Or die, in unimaginable pain. Why would anyone refuse the gift of immortality, with their greatest pain taken away from them?”

“Maybe because,” Dean growled, twisting his arms again anew, “some of us want to learn from our mistakes, and we’ve been reliably informed that immortality ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

With a _crash_ and a _thunk_ , a bloodied, broken angel came tumbling down the stairs. Before Inge could say anything else, the two men who had dragged Cas out of the room hours before hauled him up off the floor and stumbled him back to the post.

Cas was bloodied, head to toe. His white shirt was ripped, bleeding red across the back and slashed, like he’d been whipped. Across his arms, deeply etched runes leaked a thick, black, bubbling substance that oozed down Cas’s arms, between trails of his own blood. As he was dragged past, he tried to focus on Dean, but his eyes were woozy and erratic. He didn’t say anything as his pair of handlers re-trussed him to the post behind Dean.

Inge left with them, and the room was quiet and dark once more.

“Cas?” Dean reached out desperately with his fingers, trying to grasp at Cas’s hand once more but finding only his forearm. His voice shook shamefully, but he was too exhausted to care. “Are you okay? What did they do to you?”

Cas took a minute to catch his breath, heaving in deep pants.

“You alright, buddy?” Sam called across, his speech slurred from weariness and dehydration.

“I’m fine,” Cas said. “I’ll be fine,” he corrected, reluctantly.

“What happened?” Dean asked, not wanting to know just as much as he had to.

“There’s a chapel upstairs, with an idol like the one at the cabin,” Cas said weakly. “They forced me before it, whipped me down until they could pin me. They carved runes into me—they’re going to come back for me, they said. At sunset, which won’t be long, they’re holding me here while they prepare themselves.”

Dean hauled in a breath that didn’t want to fill his lungs. “Cas, I—”

“This isn’t your fault, Dean,” Cas said. “I need you to listen to me. I fought as much as I could. Broke a lot of things.”

“We heard,” Sam said, in a tone that was almost affectionate. “You’ve never been one to go down without a fight.”

Cas gave a low chuckle, but he carried on speaking. “Can you reach my arm, Dean?”

“Huh?” Dean flexed his fingers back, reaching to grasp around Cas’s forearm. His skin with slick with blood and gunk, and Dean didn’t want to press down, lest he hurt him further. “Yeah, I got you.”

“We have to do this quickly, they’ll be coming back any minute.”

“Do what?”

“Feel along my arm, the underside. Can you feel a wound, running down it?”

Reluctantly, Dean splayed his fingers out and pressed along Castiel’s skin, sliding over the lumpy, oozing runes. Cas let out a sharp hiss of pain as his fingers found a wet, deep cut. “Yeah, buddy. Wanna explain what I’m doing here?”

“They had glass votives on the altar. Thick ones. I managed to thrash around enough that I could smash one.”

Dean had a gross feeling he knew what was coming next. “Cas, did you—”

“There’s a chunk of glass lodged in my forearm. Get it out, and you can cut your ropes after they take me.”

Dean heard Sam suck in a low breath.

“Damn, Cas,” he said. “That’s… smart. Nasty, but smart.”

Squeezing his eyes shut, Dean focused on his fingers and moved them as gently as he could over the wound, pressing her and there, feeling for the embedded glass.

Another sharp, loud hiss let him know when he’d found it. He jerked his fingers back automatically.

“It’s okay,” Cas said very softly. “Just do it, Dean.”

“But—”

“Just do it.”

It took a long, agonizing time to make progress. It was an awkward angle, and Dean had to work slowly and carefully, trying to get his fingers around the broken glass without breaking it, or digging it in further, or slicing himself too badly in the process. As he painstakingly wiggled it back and forth, Cas arm periodically tensed, and the occasional gasp escaped the cage of his gritted jaw; he was biting down so hard Dean could his teeth squeaking in the dark.

“Sorry, sorry Cas,” Dean murmured, again and again, more for his own benefit than the stoic angel’s, he supposed.

“It’s okay,” Cas whispered back thickly. “It’s worth it, carry on.”

Sam was silent, waiting.

Eventually, about to give up, Dean felt the shard give under his fingers, easing out suddenly towards him. A thick gush of blood followed, greasing Dean’s hand with a sickening, unwanted warmth.

Cas let out a snarl, but cut it off sharply, as if he’d bitten down on his lip.

He grasped the glass firmly, desperate not to drop it. It wasn’t huge; a sharp triangle about two inches long. But used carefully, it would be enough.

“Got it,” Dean announced, relieved it was over.

“Hide it in your palm so they don’t see it when they grab me,” Cas ordered.

Dean had a lot to say, but he bit his tongue, distracted by creaking floorboards overhead.

“All of the torches are up high, or encased, and the fireplaces are all shielded,” Cas said quickly, whispering. “The Jötunn is a creature of ice, I wonder if—”

Cas cut off sharply as the door opened, but Dean managed to grasp his train of thought. Wordless, Dean desperately clutched behind him with his glass-free hand, trying to find any piece of the angel to hold on to. He only got the tips of his fingers, but they stayed entwined.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations! Apologies if my Dutch is imperfect, I did my best with it and took advice from a native speaker, but feel free to let me know if I need to make a correction! 
> 
> -
> 
> “Inge, geef de uitverkorene wat water. Hij heft dorst.” - _"Inge, bring water for the chosen one. He is thirsty."_
> 
> “Drink, uitverkorene. Je moet gezond zijn, sterk zijn, voor onze meester.” - _“Drink, blessed one. You must be healthy, must be strong, for our master.” ___
> 
> “Stubborn American,” she grumbled. “Hij is Mmisschien gezegend door de meester, maar niet met hersenens.” - _"Blessed by the master maybe, but certainly not blessed with brains.” ___
> 
> “Just you. You are strong one. Je pijn trok hem aanlokte hem als een baken, kind. Laat hem voor je zorgen.” - _"Your pain called out to him like a beacon, child. Let him take care of you.”_
> 
> “Inge! Die andere man is wakker! Roep Kees en Guuss en vertelzeg ze dat het mooie vriendje van de uitverkorene klaar is om voorbereid te worden en naar de kapel gebracht te worden.” - _Inge! The other man is awake! Call Kees and Guus, tell them the chosen one’s pretty lover is ready to be taken to the chapel and prepared.” ___
> 
> “Wat wil je van me? Wat wil de Jötunn van ons?” Cas snarled. - _“What do you want from me? What does the Jötunn want from us?” Cas snarled._
> 
> “Stilte! Jij wordt een machtigkrachtig offer aan onze meester. Jij zult de pijgn van de uitverkorene vormen, omdat hij zal vreselijk zal lijden als hij jou verliest!” - _“Quiet! You will make a powerful sacrifice to our master. You will make the chosen one’s pain so much deeper! You will draw him out for us—the chosen one will suffer greatly for loosing you!”_  
> 


	9. Chapter 9

Inge returned. She glanced over at Sam and Castiel, but beyond that paid them no heed; her attention was all on Dean. She set down her lantern on the floor near the stairs. Her other hand carried a simple pewter dish, which contained a serving of some kind of stew and a hunk of bread.

He had to admit, as she pushed it under his nose, it smelled fucking delicious. But there was also no way he was swallowing anything this bitch put in his mouth. The fact that he hadn’t eaten since at least the day before—he thought, anyway, who knew how time worked in this warped forest—was making his stomach start to ache, but he’d rather starve than chew what she had to offer.

“You must keep your strength up,” she said, waving a spoonful at him.

“By letting strange cult members feed me? Sorry lady, not my kink.” Dean turned his head determinedly to the side.

Her fingers were strong as they grabbed his jaw. _How the fuck are all these people so goddamn strong,_ he thought, twisting in her grip.

Despite his thrashing protests, her claw-like pulling at his jaw resulted in a gap big enough to shove some stew past his lips.

He held it in his mouth for just a moment before he spat it in her face.

She shrieked angrily, and gave him a furious, reproachful look. From behind the post, Dean heard a weak, low chuckle. Perhaps it wasn’t the time to dwell on it, but Dean couldn’t help the surge of relief and joy behind his ribs at hearing Cas give that tiny, dry laugh. He was weak, but as long as they could get him out of there safely…

“Sorry if I’m not lining up to trust the crazies who have me trapped in their basement,” Dean said, a trickle of delicious brown gravy making its way down his chin.

“You are offered relief here,” said said softly, wiping off her face with her tunic sleeve. Settling another spoonful of vegetable chunks into her hand, she continued talking. “We were all travelers once, like you. Before we were chosen. He senses your pain, your guilt. He just wants to help you.”

Dean dodged the spoon doggedly. “Yeah, well, I like my pain just fine.”

Sam spoke up from his post, ignored in the other half of the room. “Why did you torture Cas? How is that going to persuade Dean to join you, huh?”

Her eyes flickered to Sam, but she paid him no head.

“Answer him,” Dean hissed, keeping his mouth closed as much as he could. At his back, he felt Cas’s ropes twist.

“Our master thinks that sacrificing the blue-eyed man will bring about great grief in you.” She smiled, oddly out of sync with her macabre words. “Especially as you will know that it was because of you, in my master’s pursuit of _you._ Your guilt and heartbreak over him is already loud enough to have summoned the Jötunn to you… it will only get worse.”

The ropes that ran around the post behind Dean’s back, tying Cas tightly to it, stopped in their shifting, like Cas had frozen at her words.

Dean didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t begin to prove her wrong; the wave of guilt and rage her words brought up was overwhelming.

“The other man, too—” She nodded across to Sam. “—it will hurt you very much if he dies because of you. They will come to prepare him later. The Jötunn will come to take the sacrifices—and then he will take you, and remove all that pain, and grief, and suffering!”

Dean looked into her ecstatic, wild eyes and knew right then he was being fed by a mad woman.

“You will never feel that kind of emotional pain again! Not in your whole long life! You will worship at his tree with us, give him every emotion that is not necessary—and you will bow forever! It’s such an honor, to be chosen.”

Dean was speechless. _Holy shit. I’ve been tied up by the Ancient Norse equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church._

Inge leaned in again with the spoon. This time Dean was prepared and managed to get his foot up in time so kick her straight in the sternum, throwing her back against the packed dirt floor with a solid _thud._

“Back OFF you crazy bitch!”

Grimacing, Inge rose. Picking up the pewter bowl that had tipped all over as she flew, she smoothed out her tunic and picked her way through the spilled stew to the stairs. She looked back over her shoulder for a long moment, but said nothing.

Her soft steps up the pine stairs left the room in silence.

“Dean—” Cas began, his voice very small, hesitant.

“Not now, Cas,” Dean snapped. “We have to get out of here, okay?”

He sensed, rather than saw, Cas’s nod.

“If we can get up the stairs,” Sam said, resting his head back on the wooden column he was tied to as he spoke, “I suggest setting fire to this whole damn place.”

Dean gave a low chuckle. “With you on that one, Sammy.”

In the dim light—though at least a little lighter than before, as Inge had left her lantern in the fuss of her departure—Dean began to saw.

Holding the chunk of blood-smeared glass between his fingers, Dean began to rub it back and forth across the closest piece of rope that he could get his fingers around. He had to take his time, the glass shard was slippery from Cas’s blood; there was no plan b if he dropped it.

Dean’s stomach churned uncomfortably at the feel of Cas’s blood beneath the tips of his fingers on the glass, and the itching across the back of his hands as it dried onto his skin.

There were so many things that Dean wanted to get out of this basement, this village, this entire forest, so that he could address. In the silence of their small prison, Dean’s mind drifted while his fingers worked.

He thought of Inge’s words, about how his heartbreak and grief over Cas had led to this. He thought of Cas’s own confessions of emotion and understanding, followed by the weight of his arms around Dean when he’d simply needed it. He thought of the sensation of Cas’s dry lips crashing against his in the snow.

He had so, so many questions.

Dean sawed faster.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“How’s it going over there?” Sam croaked.

Dean would have given his left leg to get Sam some water, but as it was, all he could do was fumble with the ropes.

“Making progress,” he said. “Slowly. Gotta be careful I don’t drop it.”

The grotesquely humid air of the basement clung to Dean’s skin, only aiding in greasing his fingers and making the job of escape all the more unpleasant. The scents of dampness, ripe earth, and sweat were starting to catch in the back of Dean’s throat, but he didn’t have the energy to concentrate on any of that.

There was only the glass and the rope.

His fingers stilled and froze as the door creaked once more. Cas let out a frustrated sigh at the sound, and Dean was right there with him.

 _If they’re going to imprison us in a basement,_ Dean thought, _they could at least leave us alone for a few days like they do in the movies._

Two pairs of feet came down the stairs, one after another—Rees and Guus, again. Both were wiry, skinny men, but one was easily a foot taller than the other. Despite their underfed appearance, Dean had seen how they handled Cas; he’d bet without trying them that their hands held just as much strength as Inge and the nasty old woman.

 _“Snel! Grijp hem, Guus. De zon gaat onder, **”**_ the first one said.

“Oh, hello again,” Dean said conversationally. “What’ll it be this time? Chatting, force feeding, or torture?”

 _“Ik hoop dat hij een minder grote mond heeft, als hij zich aan ons heeft onderworpen heeft,”_ the other one rolled his eyes to the first.

They split, one going to Dean’s left and one going to Dean’s right, and disappeared out of his view. He could hear Cas twisting and flailing as they grabbed him, hear the sounds of his ropes being loosened and dropping to the floor.

“Cas!” Dean called, tasting his own panic amongst the bile of his tongue.

“Just focus, Dean,” Cas hissed weakly while the two cult members, as Dean had decided they were, dragged him past.

Castiel looked so weary. Dean studied him desperately in the light of the lantern, cataloging the bruises blooming across his face and the bloodied, thick runes carved deep into his skin. The angel gave him a weak smile.

He did his best to return it, while feeling like his stomach was sinking.

The men had one arm under each of Cas’s armpits, tugging him along unceremoniously behind them like a lumpy sack. The angel stared at Dean as he struggled weakly, and Dean stared back, and neither said anything.

As the taller man walked past the window, he turned to look firmly at Dean. The smile that he graced him with was cruel, as he reached up to slide open one of the hatches in the wall, like a primitive window, that Dean had spotted earlier.

“That should give you a good view, chosen one,” he intoned maliciously.

When the door slammed again, Dean resumed his fastidious rope cutting, gripping the shard of glass firmly. So what if he sliced his fingers here or there. It was hardly a care.

“A view?” Sam asked quietly. “Of what?”

Dean looked up for a moment, not stopping in his sawing. “I dunno. All I can see is the tree line at the edge of the forest, and those posts out in the courtyard.”

“Is the sun setting?” Sam asked, as if he was trying to make a point.

Beyond the packed-dirt courtyard that led out in front of the building they were beneath, an orangey glow bathed the sky, highlighting the snowy pines. Clearly, they wanted Dean to be able to see whatever was happening to Cas at sunset.

Dean frowned, and slid the glass over the rope faster.

“Careful, Dean,” Sam murmured. “I know you’re worried about Cas. I am too. But slow and steady, okay. That’s our only chance.”

 _No pressure,_ thought Dean.

The soft sound of the sharp glass nicking at the rope and their elevated breathing in the damp air was all that could be heard for long minutes. Dean jerked his head, flicking some tense, cold sweat from his forehead before it could sting his eyes.

“Dean?” Sam’s voice seemed suddenly loud against the quiet glass music. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Might as well,” Dean murmured, still focused on their painfully slow escape. “Beats just thinking while I saw.”

“Well, you’re probably gonna be a dick about it, so…”

“Hey,” Dean grumbled. “I’ve been trying pretty hard to be less of a dick, okay.”

“Yeah, yeah! Of course!” Sam agreed, a little too quickly, almost nervously. “I just don’t know if this is something you’re, like, ready to talk about yet.”

Dean stayed quiet, suspicious. “Are you asking when I’m tied up so that I can’t hit you?”

“A little.”

“Damn, dude. That’s a little harsh. Ain’t nothing that bad.” Dean frowned, disliking how this conversation was painting him so far.

The squelching of mud caused them both to pause as someone passed just beyond the hatch, the opening showing nothing but a pair of simple pant legs as they passed close to the building.

“Out with it,” Dean said, once they’d passed.

“So… Cas.”

Dean took a deep breath.

“Were you ever gonna say anything to me? Or was I just gonna start finding rainbow striped socks on your door handle someday, if things carry on the same way?”

“Dude!” Dean spluttered, his deep breath betraying him.

“Come on Dean, it’s an honest question. I’m not judging you, okay? But you’re my brother, and I feel like… I mean, I hoped you’d have felt like you could have _said_ something to me.”

Dean felt his cheeks heating ferociously until they almost stung, like some kind of tell-tale emotional sunburn. He kept his eyes straight ahead on the hatch window, kept his fingers pushing the glass through the thick, heavy rope. He was half way.

He could deny everything. He knew he could, and that if he did, Sam would likely never dare to bring it up again. But was that the life he wanted? Always hiding this… _thing,_ this feeling that had ridden around in his chest for years now, refusing to budge like the passing fancy Dean had once insisted to himself that it was?

Before he could make a decision, Sam spoke up again, sounding kinder and more gentle than Dean felt he had any right to, even with his cracked lips and red, dehydrated eyes as he looked directly across at Dean.

“I’ve never been blind to it. Recently its really seemed to… to actually be something. I mean, man, I’m _hoping_ for you that it’s something, okay? Because Cas, dude… he’s seen the universe. But he looks at you like you like you’re his entire world. He always has. Those stares? It’s like you engineered whole new stars just for him.”

Dean obviously wasn’t as dehydrated as he thought, because he was choking on saliva.

“And you’re just as bad. Even when you fight, when you hate each other, you’re still somehow the center of the others universe.”

“Alright, Sam, you can quit it with the fucking poetry.”

“So… is that you admitting it? Or denying it?”

Dean thought of all the things he could say. _It’s not a big deal… So I like dudes sometimes, didn’t think I had to announce it… Didn’t realize this was a sleepover…_ But instead, what he blurted out was, “He kissed me.”

At the silence, Dean dragged his eyes from the uneventful window to Sam. Even in the dim, flickering lantern light Dean could make out Sam opening and closing his mouth slowly, trying to decide which words to form.

“Did you kiss him back?” is what Sam eventually decided on.

“Yeah, well, I mean… we didn’t exactly have time to talk about it, or really, uh…”

Sam smiled at him. He looked like he’d taken a moment to process and adjust, and then he just simply smiled. “Well,” he said, “I guess we better go get him, so you can talk about it.”

As easy as that.

Dean felt like some kind of long-carried weight had been lifted, one he hadn’t even really been aware that he was carrying.

“Thanks, Sam.”

“Yeah, it’s cool, man. Anytime you need. Just like, uh, no details, yeah? Cas is my friend too.”

Despite everything, Dean laughed.

Determined and invigorated to get the hell out of this forest and ask Cas what that bewildering, furious kiss had been about, Dean hacked at the rope with renewed vigor.   

As the first rope fell, Dean saw movement through the small window. Unable to help himself, he froze, staring.

“Dean? What’s happening?” Sam’s voice held all his own worry.

Dean couldn’t bring himself to verbally respond, distracted.

Beyond the tiny basement window, the two men dragged Cas toward one of the three tall posts that Dean had noticed earlier in the courtyard. They cuffed him roughly to it. Dean couldn’t make out tiny details, the players in the macabre scene he watched too far away, but he could see the way Cas’s body lolled against the tall post, exhausted. He stumbled to his knees, sliding down the pole, and they left him there.

People walked past the windows; too close to see their heads, blocking the window with passing tunics and simple pants. Their movements made the basement erratically darker and lighter, blocking the sunset. They filed onward, and Dean realized they were filling the courtyard, watching Cas; only a few of them, the front row perhaps, were in his line of sight. He could easily picture the others, standing eagerly beyond, their eyes fixed forward to emotionlessly watch the flayed, bleeding man who was tied to the stake.

Dean also couldn’t take his eyes off the man, but for wholly different reasons. A sour taste filled Dean’s mouth, the guilt that bubbled low in his stomach threatening to overwhelm him.

Determined, he reaffirmed his grip on the glass shard.

“They’ve tied Cas to a stake,” he explained to Sam shortly, knowing that he would be even more worried if he didn’t tell him what was happening.

He worked the rope as fast as he could, never taking his eyes from the window.

Guus and Rees, who had escorted Cas out to the courtyard, moved aside and left him alone. They had confidence in their bindings, but Dean knew that if the angel had been up top full strength, that would have been a foolish mistake.

But he wasn’t.

So Cas slumped, chained and powerless.

A kind of rhythmic chanting, too far away for the words themselves to carry, drifted through the window. The sun began to dip behind the horizon, the orangey light fading, but still illuminating the courtyard just enough for Dean to make out Cas. He twisted desperately against his bonds, before his shoulders slumped. A minute would pass, and he would try again.

He was never one to give up easy.

Dean’s chest thrummed with something like pride as he pressed harder at the secondary rope, the one up near his chest, sliding the glass across it again and again, causing it to fray.

“What now?” Sam asked, his voice even and calm—though Dean suspected that it was an effort for him, and more for Dean’s own benefit than anything.

“They’re just watching him—wait—there’s something coming out of the tree line.”

Deans hands stilled, as did his lungs and heart for a long, painful moment.

“Dean?”

“It—it looks like…”

“Dean!” Sam’s calm encouragement turned way to frustration.

“Me.”

“What?”

“It looks like _me,_ Sam—there’s something out there, walking out of the trees, right towards Cas, and it… it looks like me.”

Dean could feel Sam’s stare boring into the side of his head, but he could do nothing but fumble the glass back into place and frantically saw.

_What the fuck is happening?_

Dean—the one out there, the one approaching Cas—emerged from the trees and moved steadily towards the angel. He didn’t quicken his pace or change his stride, just moving gradually closer, as if he had all the time in the world.

The watchers, the cult members in tunics that had filed out the courtyard, all dropped to their knees, foreheads in the dirt.

When the faux-Dean reached Cas, he slowly lowered to his knees before him. It was a strange, jerky movement, something oddly inhuman about it, despite the appearance of Dean’s body. Cas refused to look up. Dean could see his head turning, forcing up, down, to the sides, anywhere but the face of the Dean in front of him.

_Cas knows that’s not me… he has to know that’s not me._

The illusion of Dean reached forward, cradling Cas’s face in his hands. Cas finally looked up at it, his head lolling slightly to the side, supported by the other Dean as he slowly caressed his face.

It was soft, and intimate, and wrong.

A kind of animalistic growl that Dean didn’t know he had in him burst from his lips.

“Dean?” Sam was worried.

“I—it—I don’t know what it’s doing, Sam.” Dean could tell his voice was higher than normal, that the fact that his frantic nerves were fraying faster than the rope was beginning to show. He no longer cared. He had to get to Cas; get that thing away from Cas; get him somewhere safe. Right then.

Deans burst of adrenaline did him no good, immediately foiled by the sharp creak of the door above them opening once more. Sam and Dean exchanged a wide eyed look. As fast as he could, Dean lashed his foot out, kicking the first fallen rope that lay on the floor off into the corner. He slumped his head and shoulders forward, curling as best he could, hoping that he could obscure the fact that half of his bindings were missing with his own form.

The elderly woman, axe and all, progressed down the stairs.

With an eerie, bug-eyed smile, the woman walked straight past Dean and over to Sam.

 _“Ok mooie jongen, jij komt met mij mee._ ”

Sam recoiled against his post, but as she unfastened the modern metal cuffs that bit into his wrists, she paused to give him a firm look and pat at the axe which hung from her waist.

_“Laat me die mooie lokken niet hoeven knippen, joch.”_

Sam’s jaw set, but he didn’t push her any further, stumbling across the floor behind her as she yanked him along.

“Dean.” His voice was weak but his eyes gleaming determinedly in the lantern light, Sam caught Dean’s gaze on the way up the stairs. “You’ve got this, okay?”

Swallowing down the fear that said _you do not got this,_ Dean started sawing again the moment the door slammed, and turned his attention back to the open hatch. It revealed the gradually darkening courtyard to him… and that was it.

Cas was gone.

The stake was empty.

“Cas!” Dean found himself gasping aloud, panicked.

He spotted him quickly, but it didn’t calm him at all.

Cas was being dragged on his knees, across the courtyard and toward the tree line, by Not-Dean.

 _Shit, shit, shit—_ Dean flexed hard, forcing his ropes against the glass.

And then.

The illusion of Dean turned. Dean could have sworn, ever after, that it turned and looked him straight in the eye; across the courtyard, through the window, straight at him.

Then, fluidly, the creature began to change.

The fake Dean stretched taller, his skin paling through white to blue. The beast that grew out of what he had been was confusing, and terrifying. Winged-looking, hand-footed, and much taller than a man, the creature was head to head with the paper birch trees that created the lower forest canopy. It bore some direct resemblance to the icon in the attic of the creepy cabin, Dean realized, though rather than its limbs being bunches of twigs, they looked like slivers of ice in tight bundles, shifting and rearranging as it moved. It’s frozen-looking limbs were the deep, icy blue of an ancient, packed glacier, and at the end of its arms there were long, vicious claws, jutting out at odd angles—causing Dean to recall the deer antlers tied to the idol. Not far off, in shape. Unlike the wicker idol, the beast had a head, a horrific thing that looked to be created from whatever bones of other creatures the forest provided, along with a disturbing pair of extra arms near its mouth. It was dark, feathery, furry, its face… it’s face…

What its face actually looked like, Dean couldn’t really say.

When he thought he had his eyes on it, the ice would shift and move, and all that was clear was a gaping maw that let out that horrific, grinding howl that sounded like two icebergs colliding.

The hand that the illusion of Dean had been using to drag Cas transformed, so Cas was dangling helplessly from the huge Jötunn’s claws. He looked to be unconscious; immobile.

“Cas!” Dean cried out, stumbling forward as the final rope around him finally snapped—then yanked back suddenly, his wrists still cuffed around the post.

As Cas dangled from its claw, swinging back and forth limply, the Jötunn reached for a long, jutting branch of paper birch with his unoccupied hand.

Dean lined up his right thumb across the base of his left, the cuff chain going limp as he brought his hands together. With a deep breath, and a sickening _CRACK_ of bone, he slipped free.

The creature turned and looked at Dean again. Dean didn’t even doubt it, this time.

Then he lifted the angel up high, like a puppy with a toy, and impaled him on the branch of the tree.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More translations! I know some of you don't care particularly, or the context makes it obvious, but I figure one or two of you might be specifically interested. So here you go!
> 
> -
> 
> “Snel! Grijpo hem, Guus. De zon gaat onder,” the first one said. - _“Grab him quick, Guus. The sun is setting,” the first one said._
> 
> “Ik hoop dat hij een minder grote mond heeft, als hij zich aan ons heeft onderworpen heeft,” the other one rolled his eyes to the first. - _“I hope he has less of a mouth after he submits,” the other one rolled his eyes to the first. ___
> 
> “Ok mooie jongen, jij komt met mij mee.” - _“Alright, pretty one, you come with me.”_
> 
> “Laat me die mooie lokken niet hieven knippen, joch.” - _“Don’t make me cut that beautiful hair, boy.” ___


	10. Chapter 10

The door at the top of the pine stairway was, predictably, also pine. It only took Dean one firm shoulder-ram to smash the door open. It wasn’t quiet, but his options, and time, were hugely limited.

He’d pinned his hopes on the idea that the cult members would probably be occupied either preparing Sam for his turn in the spotlight, or outside watching Cas, watching the Jötunn, watching-- 

Dean’s thoughts cut off sharply.

He just couldn’t.

He couldn’t dwell on what he had just seen. Completely numb, he charged through the destroyed door and onto the first floor of the building they had been imprisoned beneath.

There were several other doors leading off to other rooms on the same level, and a sturdier door which he guessed must lead outside. There was a second staircase ahead, leading further on up. One of the interior doors was open, and with a quick peek, Dean realized that it led back into the kitchen they had entered through when the snow chased them inside.

The empty room he stood in was square and uninteresting; pine floorboards, a few chairs, and a fireplace. The front of the fireplace was covered with heavy, thick iron screening, just like the first one they had seen in the kitchen.

From above, the sound of muffled chanting.

He thought back to Cas’s theory—interrupted, but indicated enough for Dean to understand—that the Jötunn, demigod-like or not, was ultimately a creature of ice, and that fire might be their best weapon. The way that all of the torches in the village were mounted way up high, and all the fireplaces he’d seen were behind screens, Dean was inclined to think that the villagers certainly gave flames a wide berth. Without a weapon to hand, that was his best, and only, option.

Walking over to one of the chairs set around the edge of the room, Dean picked it up. It was a simple wooden dining chair, nothing fancy, just polished pine. Hefting it up to his shoulder, Dean quickly smashed it into the floor, breaking off two legs.

In the room above him, there was movement; enough to make the floorboards creak.

Shucking off his dirty, crumpled plaid shirt, Dean ripped it in two, tying the halves around the top of the makeshift torches. With a swift, quiet journey to the kitchen, Dean had the torch tips soaked in oil. Pulling forward the heavy grating across the front of the fireplace there, Dean winced at the horrific squeaking noise it made.

A quick search of the kitchen also gave him a heavy, sharp meat-knife; better than nothing.

He lit one torch; tucking the other into the belt of his pants for later.

Dean was an expert at getting up creaky staircases silently; it was one of those odd, lesser hunter skills that could really change the outcome of a hunt on occasion. So, he progressed steadily, and near silently, up the stairs. The chanting grew louder the closer he got to the second floor. He paused outside the door at the top of the stairs, pressing his ear to it and trying to listen for any clues beyond the chanting.

There were none; just the low throb of voices.

As quietly as he could, Dean pressed his thumb down on the door latch and creeped it open.

After watching the guy that he was in love with be impaled and seeing his young prophet friend flayed grotesquely in a tree, the sight behind the door lost some of its impact. But it was still, in its way, utterly horrifying.

Unchallenged, Dean let the door swing open.

The room was sat up like a chapel, as he’d expected from Cas’s earlier words. At the far end of the room was a wooden altar, with a circular window above it. On the top of the altar sat one of the twig-and-twin idols much like they had found Kevin praying to in the cabin. Tellingly, Dean hoped, there were no candles in the chapel. Until he opened the door, it must have been near dark inside, the only light coping from the high window that framed the waning sunset.

Before the altar, trussed up, gagged and wild eyed, was Sam.

Dean quickly counted a blessing that so far, Sam didn’t seem to have been injured. The set of sharp-looking, iron ritual tools that graced a small table next to him seemed to indicate he would have been, though.

None of those sights in the chapel were particularly surprising. What had Dean paused, horrified, in the doorway was the rows of worshipers.

The room wasn’t huge; so even with every pew filled, there were probably no more than twenty people. But Dean wasn’t convinced that “people” was a remotely accurate descriptor for these things.

Pale, yellowish, malnourished-looking, the bodies were practically mummified. So old that they were but paper and bone, the worshipers kneeled with their heads bowed. Tufts of dried, wiry hair stuck out here and there, like on the heads of ancient, exhumed corpses.

The room smelled of dry rot and death.

Paying no heed to Dean, they kept up their steady chanting. If it wasn’t for that, Dean would have thought them dead.

Sam’s eyes were bugging out of his head in horror, and he made muffled shouts against the fabric gag that stuffed his mouth. His hands were tied in front of him and so, smoothly, as they’d done more times before than either of them cared to count, Dean threw him the knife from the kitchen.

He caught it, and twisting it back between his own wrists, he began to slice and the twists of twine and fabric that held him into kneel on the floor, in false supplication before the altar.

Dean took a cautious step into the room, holding his burning torch out before him.

He was seriously creeped out.

Sam was scrabbling out of his ties with practiced ease, so Dean kept his attention on the dried-out worshippers.

This, he knew, was the end result of the Jötunn’s offer of immortality. Eternal life, yes, perhaps—but not eternal youth. A mummified, sickening collection of eternal worshippers, for the twisted descendant of Loki himself?

Dean would rather die, a hundred times over. Again.

He held his torch closer, peering at one of the eerily immobile, chanting people. The sound of Sam’s ropes hitting the floor was a relief for a mere moment—

Then they moved.

With a dusty cracking noise, the worshipers necks snapped back, the chanting cutting off immediately.

A frighteningly loud _screech_ ripped out of them all. The chest-shaking scream echoed around the room and reverberated through Dean’s veins, chilling his blood and causing him to instantly break out in goosebumps.

“Dean!” Sam barreled toward him, wielding the knife.

Dean slashed frantically around with his torch, sweeping it in long arcs as the worshippers began to move, with the jerky, undignified movements of someone that hasn’t moved in a long, long time. Years, perhaps, in their case, Dean thought—or decades, or even more.

The mummified people shrieked and clawed, but then recoiled back from the flames as Dean’s torch swept in their direction, pushing them back.

“Dean!”

Dean looked across to Sam and saw that he was getting overwhelmed by the other half of the mummy folk, holding his own as best he could with just the meat knife, but outnumbered.

Holding his torch at arm’s length and backing up, Dean reached down to his belt and pulled out the second makeshift torch that he had made when he was downstairs. Lighting the tip of it with the flame of his own, he prepared to throw it.

“Sammy! Heads up, it’s hot!”

Sam’s grip was sure as Dean threw the torch high, using his notable height advantage over any of the worshipers to grab it as it fell toward him.

They made their way toward each other, using their lit torches like batons to control the small, ancient crowd. They began backing toward the door.

One of the worshippers let out another loud, screeching wail, and Dean lost what little semblance of temper he had left, pulling back to clobber the walking-corpse around the side of his head with the lit torch.

Its hair ignited instantly with a soft roar, and within seconds the whole head was aflame. The bandages that covered its eyes and nose were as dry as good tinder. The worshiper howled, its dried-out arms jerking upwards, desperately trying to beat out the fire that engulfed it, quickly spreading down to its shoulders. The others recoiled from it, and Dean had the opening he needed to dart back to the door, slamming it shut as Sam flew through behind him.

Dean braced himself against the frame, holding the door shut. Dull thuds sounded as the mummified cultists began throwing themselves at the back of the door.

Working in sync, Sam jammed the wooden chair leg that made up the torch he held through the looping iron door handle, effectively locking the door from the outside.

“Burn everything?” Sam asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Burn everything,” agreed Dean. The torch Sam had used to barricade the door closed was already making quick work of the unfinished pine door frame, but Dean used his own torch to encourage the flames on around it just in case.

After only a few seconds, they both bounded off down the stairs.

“Where’s Cas?” Sam called from behind Dean.

And suddenly it hit Dean again, like a donkey kick in the diaphragm. Or perhaps somewhere a little higher, that was beating erratically.

“He—the Jötunn. He took him off the stake and…” Dean swallowed harshly, not wasting any time as he thundered down the last of the stairs into the room with the fireplace below, the screams of the cultists above increasing as the flames spread. “He impaled Cas on a tree. Like Kevin. Ran him right through.”

Sam was silent, and Dean couldn’t—wouldn’t—turn around to see his expression.

Dean looked around the near-empty main room of the building, something like a den he supposed, with all the chairs—but he found nothing new to help them. The remaining cultists would be on them as soon as they saw the flames, he knew, so they needed to find some weapons.

“Dean…” Sam’s voice was hollow. “Cas was so low on power, so weak, he was practically—”

“We need to find some kind of weapon,” Dean talked over Sam, his heart racing as he screwed his eyes up shut, bringing his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose.

He felt Sam’s hand come up to his shoulder; a brief squeeze, then he moved on.

“Let’s check these other doors, and the doors in the kitchen,” Sam said, his voice tight.

Dean was grateful that Sam didn’t try to voice it again, that worry, that nagging realization that had been sitting in Dean’s stomach and lungs ever since he’d seen Cas’s body go slack against the tree.

He just couldn’t deal with it right then.

Just thinking of it briefly, he felt dizzy and sick and out of control. And it wasn’t the time for that.

With Sam by his side, Dean charged on. Sam wielded the meat knife, Dean held the torch, and they tried every room in the building.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They had resorted to the small outbuilding attached to the kitchen before they found anything useful. They had come into the tiny room by way of the kitchen, thinking that it was a walk-in pantry, but there was another door that led directly outside, which was slightly ajar. The air that seeped in through the crack smelled fresh and icy like the snowy forest beyond, causing Dean’s nose to wrinkle. It also made him shudder and realize how warm their underground basement had been in comparison to the forest. But, at least it was worth it.

“Woah,” Sam understated. “This is… a lot. Do you think any of this works?”

Dean stood just behind him, blinking. “We don’t have time to look a gift horse in the mouth. C’mon, let’s grab.”

He pushed past Sam into the small outhouse. They closed the door behind them, having Dean’s torch for light.

The tiny lean-to that was nestled onto the outside of the kitchen had a pitched roof and dirt floor, and it was packed to the brim. There were wooden crates that they’d wouldn’t have time to investigate, but leaned up in corners were bunches of guns. _Old_ guns.

“Wow,” Dean said, wrapping his fingers around the muzzle of an old, frontier rifle. “These must be worth a pretty penny. Ammo?”

“Check,” said Sam, holding up a thick leather pouch that rested on top of one of the crates.

“Great.” Dean nodded, his eyes darting around the room to encompass all the treasure it held. “Just look at all of this stuff, Sam… I bet this belonged to our mummy friends, way back when they arrived here.”

“Yeah, that seems likely,” Sam agreed. “It’s sad though. All these people, lost in the woods… and for the Jötunn to take them, they were all in pain. Our lives are always pain so the fact it picked one of us is no surprise but…” Sam gestured around at the piles of hiking backpacks, walking canes, modern boots, muskets and old, colonial clothes. “What was so bad in all these people’s lives?”

It was a sobering moment, and the air hung heavy for a second in the lean-to.

“Well,” said Dean, “I think it’s safe to say that no matter what your issues are, handing yourself over to worship a deranged angel baby and becoming one of his monster mummies? Not how you should handle it.”

“Heh, yeah,” Sam muttered, moving to the side to let Dean past so that they could get out.

Dean pulled the door open—

Suddenly to find himself face to face with the elderly woman who had knocked them out with the flat of her axe and dragged them to the basement. The same wizened old hag who had forced water down his throat and told him he was _marked_ by the creature.

She let out a wheezing sound as she swung her axe upwards; but imbued with some kind of magical-strength or not, Dean’s reflexes were better than those of a wrinkled near-mummy.

He jabbed out automatically, punching her square in the face.

She staggered back two steps from the motion alone before her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped against the outside wall of he building with a disturbing, solid _THUD._

Sam pushed out of the tiny storeroom, past Dean, to see what the hell was going on. His eyes widened at the old woman on the ground.

“Alright. So, either they know we’re missing from the basement or the fire is catching.”

“Yup,” agreed Dean, grabbing a handful of ammo out of the pouch that Sam carried. Handing his torch over to his brother, he began to load the muskets. The torch caused eerie, bouncing shadows in the growing night, the sun having slipped down beyond the horizon entirely while they were busy in the chapel.

Sam kept watch, and Dean learned his way around the old weapons.

“These are going to take a hot minute to reload,” Dean complained. “So only fire if you really have to.”

Handing one of the muskets over to Sam, he jammed a few papers of gunpowder, some ammo and an emergency flint, all contained within the pouch, into his back pocket. He took the torch back, and as Sam had the meat knife from the kitchen, he reached down to take the flat axe from the old woman, sliding it into his belt at his hip.

“Ready?” Dean asked, already moving back to the store room door and raising his torch.

“Ready,” repeated Sam grimly. “What’s the plan?”

“Fire,” said Dean grimly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Jötunn’s enclave of sad misfits, as Dean had christened it, was dark and fairly quiet. Dean and Sam had set fire to the storage room before leaving the chapel building. With its simple pine construction, they had no doubts that the whole building would go up in flames quickly, with the store room fire in addition to the orange glow that was now visible through the windows of the second floor.

They were moving down the side of the chapel building, setting fire to the rafters of various smaller buildings along the way. Dean planed to loop around the side of the building and head to the courtyard, where the villagers were all assembled, setting fire to everything he found on the way.

When he reached the courtyard, his only plan was to draw the Jötunn out somehow.

Either he would save Cas—which the panicky bile in his stomach told him was unlikely, given Cas’s weakness even before he was impaled—or he would avenge him, and Kevin, and every other fucker manipulated and ensnared by the Jötunn.

Dean told Sam as much, quietly under his breath, as they moved.

Dean could see Sam’s sadness when he mentioned the angel, it was threaded through his tense eyebrows and pressed into his tight lips. But worse was the fact that Dean knew that some of that sadness was now for him, for the potential that Dean had lost.

Dean wished he’d never said anything.

“Doesn’t seem fair,” Sam said. “You having to play the part of the vengeful lover now, when you never even got to—”

“Stop.” Dean interrupted sharply. “Don’t say that shit. I just can’t deal with it right now.”

Obediently, Sam went silent, though his eyes were still very loud.

“Do you remember what crazy Inge was saying before I kicked her across the floor?” Dean whispered, forcing himself to focus elsewhere with the ease that decades of practice brought.

“Vaguely,” said Sam. “She was ranting about how you could worship with them.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed, low. “She said I could worship _at his tree._ ”

“Oh!” Sam blinked. “Like a nature spirit or a creature tied to a specific location…”

Dean nodded.

“So, we need to find the tree,” Sam said. “Just in case.”

“There’s probably hundreds of thousands of trees in this forest. But I think it’s a safe bet that the one she was talking about is near here.”

“The tree part makes sense, now,” Sam mused quietly as they crept.

“How so, Brains?”

“It seemed odd that the Jötunn just strolled across the Bering Strait and came to America. But that’s probably not what happened—if this thing is as old as Cas says it is, then it’s probably been right here for thousands of years.” Sam paused while they set fire to another store building, moving closer to the courtyard. “This continent was joined to northern Europe, once, via the arctic. There were forests bigger than we can imagine, stretching from Scandinavia down to what’s now the US.”

“So it didn’t come willingly, as such,” Dean surmised, nodding. “It was cut off. Alone. So, it found new worshippers.”

“Seems like.”

They got most of their way to the courtyard before their luck ran out.

With a loud, clanging bell and some screaming hubbub, the chaos began.

“Guess they saw the flames,” Dean hissed, diving behind a small, single story shack. He yanked Sam back by the arm as the worshippers from the courtyard began to run toward the center of the cluster of pine buildings, yelling and panicking.

The clearing at the bottom of the valley turned bright, and began to project shimmering, orange ghosts along the trees up its sides, the branches of the pines highlighted and shadowed in equal measure by the leaping flames. It would have been beautiful, if it wasn’t so destructive. The old buildings, thin walled and pure pine, became giant bonfires as the flames caught and held.

“Let’s go,” Dean yelled over the noise, darting out from behind the building when the bulk of the villagers had fled the courtyard. “While they’re distracted, we spread the fire to the forest and get the hell out of here.”

He didn’t need a response from Sam; he was already right beside him, running for the courtyard, headed for the tree line.

A furious, reverberating sound like metal scraping across ice made the ground shake.

As the dirt under their feet trembled, Dean and Sam steadied each other automatically, stumbling and grabbing at each other’s arms.

“Holy shit,” said Sam.

Emerging from the tree line, bigger than the paper birch trees, head amongst the tamaracks, was the Jötunn.

The creature was livid, screams of icy fury cracking through the air. His hoof-like feet smashed into the ground, making the whole village shake. His anger seemed directed at the flames, but not contained to it; he smashed his fists into the floor, sending people tumbling like dominos all around.

“Son of a bitch!” Dean complained as both he and Sam careened into the wall of the shack they’d been trying to run past.

As soon as the ground steadied enough for movement, they pressed on. The Jötunn was wild, by then. His rage unfiltered as his village, his chapel, his worshippers themselves, ignited orange in the dark night.

With a scream—both of ice and flesh—a villager flew past Dean and Sam, landing with a sickening _thunk_ and a broken neck in the dirt. Sam’s hand darted out, grabbing at Dean’s arm.

“Dean, we’re never going to make it past him to get to the tree line this way.”

“He’s distracted tossing around the villagers!”

“Yes,” Sam said testily, “but as far as he’s concerned we’re just more of them. He’ll pick us up and fling us god knows where the second we try and run past him.”

Holding onto the wall of a wooden-framed well as the ground beneath their feet tilted, Dean frowned, but nodded. “Yeah. Right. And if he sees who we are, likely worse. Look at the size of that bastard, he could pop our heads like grapes.”

Sam threw Dean a slightly disgusted look as they clung onto the well, but he didn’t argue.

When the Jötunn ceased its stomping, they straightened and looked at each other.

“So what’s the plan—” Sam started to say, but cut himself off.

Dean was listening, or trying to, but his gaze drifted over Sam’s shoulder. As the Jötunn moved, turning further to face the village and throw his toys, the tree line became more visible.

And there was Cas.

Dean gulped down bile. His ears were hot and his palms were sweating and his stomach churned. He was sure he was breathing but from the way Sam was shaking his shoulder, maybe not.

Cas hung limp and silent, bowed over the branch. His skin was pale, gray, dancing in shadows from the flickering flames that by then illuminated the whole valley, the trees looking down on the chaos like displeased spectators at a theatre of the macabre. The puddle of blood beneath the tree was thick and horrific, far more than a person should, could, ever lose and survive. The branch that bored through his middle was thick, all the twigs and leaves ripped from it when the Jötunn had pushed Castiel onto it, his stomach a grotesquely filled tunnel around the wood.

“Dean—”

“Go.” Sawdust mouth and stinging eyes, Dean gestured out to the east, running diagonal to where they stood.

Sam looked at him.

“Run behind these last few buildings. Out to the side, the other entrance to the encampment, the way we came in. Climb the fence if they’ve closed it, I dunno. Burn everything. Burn the whole fucking state if you have to.”

Sam didn’t even answer, dodging Dean’s torch and musket with his own to bring him into a tight, rough, manhandling hug that Dean had neither the will or the way to fight, his hands and mind otherwise occupied.

“Be careful, Sammy,” he practically whispered into his brothers greasy, unwashed hair, inhaling deeply despite the musk as they clung to each other, all elbows, for just a moment.

Dean couldn’t allow his eyes to return to Cas’s body as Sam turned and ran—he knew his gaze would get stuck there and he’d crumble, and that was no way to avenge the best friend he’d ever had.

Instead, he focused on the icy bastard that put him there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Jötunn keened out a glacial roar into the night, and Dean took a moment to curse Gabriel and his greedy fuckin’ dick as he raised his musket.

_If that asshole archangel was alive, I’d kill him all over again._

Dean’s hands were shaking as he tried to get a good line of sight on the beast. He knew this gun wouldn’t fire as far, or as well, as the ones he was used to—but he bet it could still do some serious damage with it if he got close enough.

As long as the decrepit old thing didn’t blow up in his face, anyway.

Suddenly fearless in fury, Dean walked straight at the Jötunn. It was occupied sweeping its hands along the floor, bowling over the rows of terrified worshipers who had remained at the side of the courtyards, their bowed, reverent heads nothing but skittles to his giant, horn-like hands.

Dean didn’t like the musket; it was so heavy compared to the modern guns he was used to, hefting it made him feel frail. And his heart already felt that way; his body at least, needed to shut the hell up and do what he told it.

He rested it at his shoulder, ready to fire, and proceeded steadily, ignoring every flying, part-mummified person that screamed past with air beneath them. Finger on the trigger, Dean ran forward.

“HEY!”

The Jötunn paused just fractionally; just enough to show Dean he’d heard.

“HEY ELSA! YEAH, OVER HERE, BITCH!”

With a creaking, lumbering set of thuds, the creatures backward-bending legs carried it around a few steps until it looked straight at Dean. It held a villager in it’s hand, one of the younger ones, and she desperately clung onto it’s icy, antler-like claws as its body re-oriented toward Dean.

She couldn’t have been any older than twenty five, her face fresh and young and free of bandaging.

What pain could possibly have brought her here, Dean wondered. What had the Jötunn used to manipulate her?

Her spine crunched as he spun her, and she flew through the air to meet the flames that were reducing the village to ash.

The trees now were catching—either through Sam’s efforts or the sheer ferocity of the fire—and Dean was starting to feel uncomfortably warm.

The Jötunn stared, still, and Dean became aware of the soundtrack of cracking and dripping the filled the air behind the sounds of flame, providing a contrasting melody as all the snow and ice began to melt in the proximity of such heat.

 _“Je draagt meer pijn, zoete pijn, dan enig mens dat ik in duizend jaren heb gezien,”_ it roared, its voice deep, like an iceberg grounding against a rocky shore.

“Sorry, dude,” Dean said, settling his finger over the trigger. “I don’t speak Dutch, or whatever that is.”

The trigger was tighter than Dean expected, but with firm pressure, the hammer cracked down.

He was probably only twenty yards from the Jötunn; a bad place to be in terms of the creature’s arm reach, he was sure, but close enough to guarantee a firm shot, even with this old gun.

The old flintlock musket worked. But damn, it was loud.

_CRACK!_

The bullet flew from the muzzle with a sound unlike any Dean’s usual handguns had ever made, a loud, reverberating boom that bounced off the walls of all the buildings and on up the valley like a deathly yodel.

Dean thought it was actually a pretty cool sound, but he didn’t have time to play.

He had caught the Jötunn directly in the chest and it staggered back, shaking clumps of snow from the trees and causing the burnt-out roof of a nearby building to begin caving in.

The few worshipers that were left fled.

Screaming, terrified, they ran off into the forest beyond the Jötunn, bouncing off the trees as the ground shook like they were in a huge pinball machine.

Dean let them go; he wanted the Jötunn, but these people—if they were still truly living, running, and repenting, deserved to live.

Unfortunately, muskets aren’t quick fire weapons.

Dean was smarter than many people gave him credit for, and the fact that it would take a militiaman twenty seconds to reload one of these things, allowing them to fire three rounds a minute, rattled unhelpfully around his brain.

With his ice cold fingers, muscle cramps, and exhaustion, Dean wasn’t going to be firing again this minute at all. He fumbled his movements, the old woman’s axe sliding from his belt to the floor, the torch abandoned now, laying aflame in the mud.

Reaching into his back pocket he pulled out another paper of powder, but the Jötunn was on him before he’d even finished pouring.

With a thud that Dean heard as much as he felt, a deep blue, icy hand slapped forward, pushing Dean down to his knees.

_“Stomkop.”_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:
> 
> “Je draagt meer pijn, zoete pijn, dan enig mens dat ik in duizend jaren heb gezien.” - _“You carry more pain, sweet pain, than any human I have seen in a thousand years.”_
> 
> “Stomkop.” - _Fool/Idiot, etc._


	11. Chapter 11

_The gas station was indistinct, vaguer than it usually felt. But the lighting was the same; illuminated only by the relentless, irritating flickering of a street lamp beyond the wide glass storefront. The yellowish glow light seeped across the shelves of pretzels, beer, donuts, and energy drinks, giving everything an eerie, otherworldly quality. The air was hushed, too much so; no customers, the door locked, the sign reversed, gas pumps carless._

_Something felt wrong._

_Step-by-step—why were his boots so muddy?—Dean headed inevitably toward the rear of the store. Up to the cash register, a turn to the right, eight steps forward. This was beyond familiar now; this was automatic, totally out of Dean’s control._

_This wasn’t right—_

_The creepy golden light that struggled through the store barely lit the floor of the stock room as the door opened, but nonetheless, Dean’s eyes followed the widening crack that revealed the tiled floor within. Feet in a Goodwill sleeping bag, hand wrapped protectively around a shabby backpack._

_He’d been somewhere else, hadn’t he? Not here, not sleeping—_

_Castiel didn’t seem to sleep peacefully in these dreams, ever. His light snores came sporadically, as if even asleep his brain reminded him that he wasn’t safe. That he was alone. Abandoned. Unwanted. Kicked out, without a care._

_No, that wasn’t right. Dean had cared. Cas knew that now, knew—_

_Even in the dream, even this unwilling dream, Dean’s stomach felt full and heavy and hollow all at once. But something in him fought it, this time._

_Cas knew he was sorry._

_Cas had forgiven him._

_Cas—_

“CAS!”

Dean’s eyes opened sharply, wide, his breath hitching in loud, gasping puffs that made white ghosts curl into the freezing forest air. He stumbled to his feet. Even with the flames filling the whole of Dean’s vision beyond the clear courtyard, the heat along Dean’s left side cooking him, the air drifting in from the forest still tasted of snow. The juxtaposition between boiling and freezing made Dean’s stomach churn sickly—as if he needed something else to do that.

Cas stood before him—but not his Cas, no, this thing wasn’t his Cas at all. The ethereal blue pallor around the whites of his eyes, the clothing that didn’t carry any bloodstains, the patient smile—none of that was right.

_“Knielen!”_

Dean didn’t have to ask what the Jötunn meant; Cas’s hand, cold and dead-feeling, came to his shoulder and pushed down, the pointer finger of his other hand directed to the floor.

“I will not kneel to you, dick bag!” Dean hissed out.

Somewhere in the distance, there were awful sounds that Dean couldn’t quite place as being from the fire, or the creature itself; a deep, pained growl of frustration and agony, panting, and a weird, gross squelching, like meat being pressed onto a wooden chopping board. And then, a man’s pained scream that was so revolting Dean's stomach jolted violently.

Dean was puzzled, and his stomach lurched over once more. It sounded horrific.

He couldn’t think on it anymore; his energy going to fighting the Jötunn as it pressed its illusion of Cas’s hand down against his shoulder.

_“Knielen!”_

“Fuck you!” Dean yelled out this time, twisting desperately.

Like it or not, Dean was going down to kneel. His hands desperately scrambled across the mud and snow slush, searching for anything—his torch, his musket, anything at all.

His left hand felt the edge of a flat blade.

Curling his fingers around the old, archaic looking axe that the elderly woman had carried, and that he had brought with him as a last resort, Dean swung at the beast with everything he had.

The thing that was not Cas dodged back, hissing and furious, its deep, cavernously icy voice a mockery of Cas’s own deep, but rich and gravelly, tone.

Somewhere beyond the Jötunn there came a resounding _thud_.

It was loud enough to be heard even over the flames and collapsing buildings, drawing Dean’s attention from the creature for just an instant. It was solid, flat crash like something heavy falling from way up high.

Dean's stomach lurched again as the sound was accompanied by a splat and another scream.

He refocused on the Jötunn, swinging again.

It caught his wrist this time, crushing his left hand painfully until the axe dropped with a clatter.

The Jötunn-Cas kicked it aside with a depressing, metallic rattle.

Dean struggled, but as the icy eyes of the creature bored into him again, he felt himself slipping.

_He followed Cas the ex-angel moved out into the aisles of the dim, stutteringly-lit Gas’n’Sip. Cas peered around with his signature squint to try and find the source of the noise, something that Dean knew from many dreams before, had been the sound of his name. The quiet sounds of Castiel’s feet moving through the rows of mismatched gas station fare were loud in the room; the only other sounds the buzzing of a faulty refrigerator and the low hum of electricity that powered the lotto machine they couldn’t turn off._

_There were suddenly other noises though, something else, something metal—_

_All Dean could do was follow, always. He moved behind Cas, out to the door of the Gas’n’Sip. Castiel was thinner, highlighted by the way the exit sign above the door out to the gas pumps caused odd, jagged shadows around his jaw. His bag-darkened, tired eyes drifted across the forecourt, but as they always did, they shifted back inside. To Dean._

_There was a rage-filled scream somewhere, somewhere other, not in the gas station but… somewhere else._

_The advert-emblazoned, storefront window of the gas station smashed right on cue, causing Cas to curl up and protect his face with his arms like he always did. Glass shattered and crashed over him, like… like gentle, twirling ash?_

“DEAN!”

Dean gasped out loud, hauling a desperate amount of air into his lungs as his eyes flew wide again.

In front of him was Cas, but—

_Cas._

“Cas?” Dean croaked.

The angel swayed on his feet, one hand clutched desperately across the vile, gargantuan wound that penetrated his core. His white shirt was red, his pants glossy with blood down the entire leg.

He still had no shoes.

“Cas!”

In the angel’s other hand, the one not holding his insides in, was the old woman’s axe. And next to him, on the floor, was a perfect, icy replica of himself.

Beheaded.

“Dean—” was all Cas managed before he collapsed forward, falling on his knees in the mud.

 

Sam’s hands were cold as ice. He had one pressed to the back of Dean’s head, the other holding up a rough leather water flask, pouring it into Dean’s parched mouth.

Dean had no spare hands, because he held Cas.

“I heard you fire your gun at the Jötunn,” Sam was saying. “I set fire to a bunch of the trees, and it started spreading like crazy—so I looped back to come get you, and I saw Cas hauling himself out of the tree.”

Cradled roughly in Dean’s lap but too weak to care, Cas let out a small huff. “Hurt.”

“It sounded like it,” Sam said, his voice awed. “Honestly, it sounded disgusting.”

Cas opened one eye, just enough to give Sam a scathing look. He was sat on the floor, leaning into Dean’s lap as Dean kneeled on the packed dirt ground. Dean was clutching at Cas’s shoulders, holding him up slightly, as if the angel wasn’t strong enough to hold up his own body.

Which, given how he looked, was a possibility.

The water was doing a great job of reviving Dean; despite the cold, his aching hand that the Jötunn had twisted to make him drop the axe, and a few rope burns here and there, he was feeling almost human.

Sam had hauled them both quickly behind the furthest outbuilding of the village, before pulling warm cloaks and water flasks from some of the fallen villagers. A few still milled around, but they looked lost, and ignored Dean, Sam, and Cas entirely.

“So get this,” Sam spoke up again. “When you beheaded the Jötunn, Cas, it broke his illusions. When I was lighting fires in the forest, trying to burn the tree he’s tied to so he can’t just… regenerate, or whatever… I saw the road.”

“What?” Dean blinked.

Cas’s eyes were open now, and he looked around dazedly, but said nothing.

“Yeah, we’re only about half a mile from the edge of the forest where we parked the Impala, when we were trying to follow the actual trails,” Sam explained, laying one of the thick, wool cloaks across Castiel like a blanket.

“Son of a bitch,” Dean muttered, closing his eyes tightly for a moment.

Sam offered Cas some water, and the angel accepted gratefully, gulping it down in such a human way that Dean found himself staring, watching a droplet run from the corner of Cas’s mouth and trickle down his chin.

His fingers itched to reach out and catch it on his thumb; but of course, he didn’t.

“Cas is going to need a bit of recovery time after his Jötunn-beheading antics,” Sam said, straightening up and sounding firm. “So why don’t I go ahead and get the car. You two can make your way out of the forest as fast as you can, and I’ll drive back toward you to pick you up.”

Dean looked down at Cas, who managed not to look too put out as he gazed back up and nodded.

“Sure, Sammy. You’ll have to use the spare key, taped under that avoidance spell under the back left rim. God knows where my keys are now… in one of the freakin’ tents somewhere.”

“Yeah, of course, sure,” Sam said, nodding firmly. “Okay. Well, you two take your time, just try to get to the road. I’ll go as fast as I can.

“Thank you, Sam,” Cas croaked quietly.

“Nah, thank you man. Saved Dean’s life back there. Saved everybody, really. Good job.” Sam’s thanks were easy and warm, and he turned and marched off through the forest.

It was still the middle of the night, but the fire spreading through the trees was notable now, the village all but ashes on one side and brightly growing orange on the other. Dean expected to hear sirens and helicopters any second. The light was eerie, but at least navigating between the trees wouldn’t be an issue.

“We should get out of here as fast as we can,” Dean said, looking down at Cas. “Before the fire starts spreading over this way, it’s moving fast.”

Cas nodded. With the waterskin that was still left in his lap, Cas dampened a corner of the thin wool cloak that covered him and wiped it across his face, making a small relieved sound. He took a few more sips of water, before offering the flask back to Dean.

Dean did the same, feeling refreshed and much cleaner, though he still couldn’t wait to get back to civilization, and experience the luxury of a shower and a cheeseburger.

Dean struggled to his feet, and before Castiel was able to voice any objections, he scooped his arm down under the angel’s knees. He drew him up, settling him bridal-style in his arms. He could sense that Cas was about to object, loudly, just from the expression on his face, but Dean spoke quickly to cut him off.

“Cas, you got run through by a tree and you still have no damned shoes on. Angel or not, I’m carrying you to the damn road. Get over it.”

For a minute the objection hovered noticeably on Cas’s lips, accented by a faint flush at his newly-cleaned cheeks. But he let pass, to Dean’s relief.

They set off through the trees, slow but sure; Dean was strong, but Cas was no skinny bride, so this would take a little while. Dean turned briefly at the tree line, looking back at the remains of the village.

What was left of the Jötunn had disappeared by the time Sam went back to look at it. They hoped, that by burning the area, they’d purge it. But could you really kill something as ancient as that, which was half angel and half mythical beast?

Dean didn’t feel inclined to stick around and find out, and the inhabitants of the enclave, those who remained, seemed to feel the same way. They were emptying the remaining storage buildings, finding treasures lost years ago. Some lingered, some dissipated out in the forest and toward the road.

Dean let them go, figuring that their presence there, and their reasons for ending up here, were none of his business.

After a few steps into the trees, the thickness of the canopy breaking up the dim orange light overhead, Cas finally relaxed and allowed his head to loll against Dean’s shoulder.

“I thought you were dead,” Dean said as he slowly walked. It was almost a whisper.

“I’m an _angel_ , Dean. Wood can’t kill me.”

“Yeah, but—” Dean pursed his lips tightly, feeling a burn at the back of his eyeballs again. He kept his gaze straight ahead on the uneven forest ground. “You didn’t see yourself, buddy. You didn’t see what you looked like, from my side of things.”

They were quiet. Dean stopped to lean against a tree, letting Cas down for just a minute while he rested. Then he picked him straight back up, pushing on. Cas relaxed more quickly that time, curling his head comfortably against Dean’s shoulder.

The woodland got darker, the nearer to the road and the further from the fire they got. In the diminishing light, Dean managed to find the bravery to speak again. They hadn’t, he thought, been through all this just so that they could go back to not talking about things.

“Thanks, Cas.”

“What for?”

Dean could feel Cas’s vivid, forensically intense gaze on him, even in the dark.

“You saved my life, Cas. You pretty much died, you beheaded the monster, you saved the day.” Again, Dean’s words came out as barely more than a whisper.

Even in the low light, Dean could see Castiel’s eyes drop and turn.

The road was in sight across a steep field, where the full moon highlighted emerald peeks of grass amongst the clumps of snow; the weather was still cold, the ground was still packed white, but nowhere near as severely as it had been within the Jötunn’s created blizzards. So, at the tree line, Dean stopped.

He pressed his back against a tree, lowering himself down to sit at the base of it on a tuft of damp grass. Carefully, so as not to jolt any part of Cas, Dean lowered his legs to the ground. The angel ended up sat on the dirt in front of Dean, but he still leaned into him weakly. The wool cloak that one of the villagers had most likely hand sewn and cared for over many years was now soaked with blood across Castiel’s middle. Even though the light was low, the thick dark patch across the material was incriminating.

Dean slowly ducked his head, searching for Cas’s eyes.

He was suddenly, overwhelmingly aware that this was the first time they’d been alone since that hasty, furious kiss while the Jötunn hunted them. Since Cas had broken the boundaries they had erected over the years and crushed them with his lips. Dean knew that he’d messed that up, hadn’t responded, hadn’t made it what it could be.

But he just didn’t know how. There was so _much_ of it, Dean couldn’t put himself out there like that not to have what he truly felt returned. With Cas, it was always going to be all or nothing.

But now the angel was weak and bleeding, once more, for them. For the world. For Dean.

“What’s wrong, Cas?” Dean asked quietly, the sounds of melting snow dripping and splashing through the forest behind them. “You did all that stuff. You’re the hero, here. I’d be dead without you being so brave, you know that.”

Cas gave out a low, embarrassed chuckle. “That’s probably true. But that wasn’t what I was thinking.”

As Cas finally looked up to catch Dean’s eyes, the electricity was palpable, arcing between the few inches between their faces as Cas just _looked_. His eyes were a dare. _Ask me what I was thinking, Dean,_ they read, clear as day.

Dean took a deep breath, and moistened his lips. “What were you thinking, Cas?”

Cas didn’t look away. Forcing himself, neither did Dean.

“I was thinking,” Cas said, incredibly quiet, “that you’re right, I did do those things. Rescued you. Healed you. Beheaded the beast at the end of the story, I suppose.”

Dean nodded, sensing there was more, unable to look away.

“So, I wondered, if you’ll excuse the crude, human term—if I’ve done all that, then what the fuck do I have to do to get you to kiss me?”

There are moments, Dean realized calmly, where time—immobile and eternal—breaks its own laws and stretches out the seconds, so that they can be preserved. And so, Dean catalogued everything: The nerves in Castiel’s eyes, cast deep navy in the glow from the inky sky and the orange-reflecting clouds. The way his teeth pulled worriedly at his plump, dry lip. The way his eyes widened, more of the whites gleaming in the night, as Dean’s hand came forward.

He tucked his fingers back into the sweat-damp curls of Cas’s ash-filled hair, smiling as he carded through the tangled strands, pushing them back from where they had been plastered to his forehead. Dean’s hand left his hair then, slowly sliding down the side of Cas’s face. Dean memorialized the way the moonlight highlighted the peak of Castiel’s cheekbone by running the pad of his thumb along it. He felt Cas’s nervous exhale against his palm as he brought his fingers around, cupping them under the angel’s jaw, tilting his head just fractionally upwards.

“All you had to do was ask,” Dean breathed against Cas’s bottom lip.

He felt Cas’s nod more than he could see it, their faces pressed together, noses nestled beside one another’s.

They kissed.

There wasn’t a specific moment it began, they just melted into one another; Dean thought it might have actually begun when Cas had dared voice his desire for it out loud, always the braver of the two of them.

Dean had kissed, and been kissed, so many times in his life, with so many people, in so many situations; but that one felt like a first, and the experience those other kisses had given him fled his mind immediately. But that was okay—he’d never wanted to kiss Cas like he kissed anyone else, he wanted to kiss Cas like a first, and like a last. He’d always told himself that if he ever got to kissing Cas, that would be it… and yes, yes—that was it. Exactly what he needed.

Cas’s lips were warmer than the rest of his skin, pressing gentle heat into Dean’s mouth. It was soft, and they lingered long, savoring the taste and sensation. Cas was a little clumsy, Dean was a little scared. But it didn’t matter, undulating lips between them bridging all of the gaps.

Cas gave a tiny gasp against Dean’s gently probing tongue.

Dean fluttered his eyes back open just a fraction, looking through his eyelashes to check that Cas was comfortable, that this was still okay, and saw his eyes: wide, surprised, _glowing._

White and blue, shining, burning with grace.

Dean felt something deep in his chest rise up—he gave no permission for it, he didn’t control it or know what it was, he simply felt it, and observed. Something warm that felt like a soft, gentle liquid rose and expanded, reached out, reaching for Cas. And then—

Cas’s eyes were gold, and he was gasping aloud, breaking the kiss.

“Cas?” Dean panicked; but it was short lived, the angel’s bewildered, amazed smile cutting it short.

“You—” Cas paused to laugh, pushing off the wool cloak that had covered him. His right hand went to his stomach, resting there, pushing at the tattered remnants of his shirt to reveal smooth, tan skin.

“You healed,” Dean said dumbly.

“Yes.” Cas’s grin was wide, gummy, a smile like Dean hadn’t seen on his features since he’d been sent to see the angel in another world, one that never came to pass.

“But your grace…”

“No, Dean. Your soul.”

Dean blinked, and Cas laughed again, pushing to sit up from where he’d been reclined onto Dean.

“Angels can take power from souls, as you know. But it's usually an agonizing process, to take power from within a human like that.”

Dean nodded, remembering Bobby, and how wrecked he’d looked the one time Cas had done it to him.

“But I didn’t take it from you, Dean,” Cas practically whispered. “You gave it to me.”

Dean opened his mouth to argue, but let it fall shut again. He didn’t understand, the concepts so far beyond his human mind that it was laughable, but the feeling… that was easy, and absolute, and despite his lack of knowing intention, he realized that he had done exactly that.

For some reason, Dean was blushing, even if he didn’t know precisely why. “I didn’t know what I was doing, exactly. It just… happened. I guess my soul likes you,” he joked weakly.

But Cas just smiled at him through the deflective humor, reaching up to ghost his fingers across Dean’s skin before he joined their lips once more.

They were surer, then. Cas tasted of fresh, clean water and something metallic and incomprehensible that Dean felt sure was just _angel._ He dipped his tongue beyond Cas’s lips and curled it across the soft, inner flesh of his mouth, mapping his teeth, teasing at his tongue.

Dean could barely believe this was happening… but it was good, so good, that they had to keep pausing so he could smile and laugh. It would have been embarrassing, perhaps, if Cas wasn’t doing exactly the same thing.

They were chest to chest by then, Cas’s hands up around Dean’s neck and in the back of his hair, Dean’s palms sliding along the planes of the angel’s back and pulling him close, his fingers tracing his spine.

They made out until Dean was breathless, dizzy, floating. He didn’t want to stop.

A dramatically cleared throat from a few feet away made them finally pull apart.

Sam stood there, the spare Impala key between two fingers as he looked pointedly at the sky. “Car’s pulled up right at the edge of the field. You can drive, Dean, and I’m shotgun. Because there is no way I’m letting you two sit close together after that.”

Dean was delighted to realize that Cas was bright red in the light of the torch that Sam trained on them. He’d never seen the angel look so embarrassed in all his days.

“We, uh—I—” Cas stammered, lost at sea. His look to Dean was so full of worry and apology that Dean took pity on him.

“It’s cool, Cas. Sam already knows.”

“He does?”

“Oh yeah,” said Sam, pointedly looking up at the dark clouds above them, lit by the full moon and ghosted with a flame-colored glow from below. “I already coaxed it out of Dean back in the basement. I was going to have a strict no details rule, but seriously, if it embarrasses you so much, I might want details after all. How _was_ that kiss, Cas?”

Cas looked wide-eyed, terrified.

Dean nudged him with an elbow. “He’s kidding.”

Cas deflated, slowly.

Sam gave them both a much kinder grin. “I’m glad for you. Are you going to explain why Cas appears not to be bleeding out anymore?”

“Dean’s soul wished to bond with my grace, and so he inadvertently gave me an extra boost of power while our essences combined.”

“Seriously, kissing is a no-no, but you can say that with a straight face?” Dean questioned. “You two, seriously.”

Bickering gently and buzzing with the relief of being alive and together, Dean, Sam, and Cas trudged across the soggy field. As they moved through the patches of slushy snow and porcupine grass, a rumbling, cracking howl filled the night air. They paused, chilled to the core by the pain and anger wrapped up in the cold sound.

“Guess the fire made its way to the right tree,” Sam said quietly.

Dean and Cas nodded their agreement, and they turned much more quietly back to face the road, hiking silently to where Baby waited, looking comfortingly like home.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:
> 
> "Knielen!” - _"Kneel!"_


	12. Chapter 12

So ya made it back ‘fore the ice, then,” Dom the ferryman noted, something that might have been a grin crossing his weathered face. He had one disconcertingly gold tooth that flashed in the early morning light, an out-of-place glint on his otherwise worn appearance.

“Yessir,” Dean said, tipping his head with a smile.

“You’re lucky, this is the last day I’mma be makin’ the trip this year. The cold came in hard the last couple days.”

Dean huffed an agreement. _Boy, don’t we know it._

They were stood on the Angle Inlet quay, looking out over the cool, dark water that spread behind The Looney as she sat stoically amongst floating chunks of ice. Birds wheeled and keened overhead, Arctic Terns beginning to arrive for the winter and the odd skinny, mean-looking seagull. The stench of fish wasn’t as strong at Angle Inlet as it had been back at Birch Beach, but it was still a smell Dean preferred to pass on all together.

“We managed to wrap up our business in time,” Dean gave a little smile, hoping the vague answer would suffice for someone in Dom’s profession.

It seemed to. The smuggler nodded, gesturing toward the peeling gray of The Looney. “An’ suppose you’ll be wantin’ the same deal as before—four o’ you, and the pretty car?”

“Yeah—” Dean started to say, before his throat closed and something icy and tense squeezed his chest. “Actually no. Just three of us, this time. But still the car.”

Dom raised an eyebrow—or at least, his skin wrinkled in a way that suggested the eyebrow beneath the thick, knitted beanie was doing something or other. His eyes drifted back over to the car, where Sam lolled shotgun and Cas sat forward in the rear bench seat, his elbow leaning on the driver’s headrest as he and Sam intently discussed something.

“Oh,” said Dom. “The skinny Asian kid not comin’?”

Dean shook his head, not about to even begin to explain. “No. He’ll find his own way back in a few days."

Dom’s other eyebrow slid around mysteriously under the thick, green hat that he wore, but he just nodded and held out his hand. “Alright, then.”

Dean counted out notes from his wallet, glad that he’d thought to leave it in the Impala when they went hiking out into the Northwest Angle—otherwise all his money and fake ID’s would be in some tiny tent in the snow.

Sam had called the rangers for the State Park, and told them that they had got lost in the forest and lost their tents in the bad weather. The rangers were relieved they were okay, gave Sam a lecture on snow hiking safety that Dean had delighted in watching—the offended thinning of his brother’s lips had been perfection—and kindly said that if anyone recovered their belongings, they’d have them sent on down to Kansas.

“Nicely done, son,” Dom said, nodding as Dean placed the final note in his palm. “Alrighty. We’ll be leavin’ just before sundown, so get that black beauty up the ramp and onboard before then. Same bunks as last time okay? We won’t offload till right before dawn, you know the drill. Lots of sittin’ on the lake waiting.”

“I remember,” Dean said, giving Dom another grin before he indicated back toward the car. “As we’ve got the day to kill, can you recommend anywhere around here for a bite to eat, or a motel that’d let us check in for a few hours?”

Dom’s laugh was rich and warm, if slightly phlegmy. “This is Angle Inlet, not New York. They’ve got one diner, which is kinda an extension of someone’s house, and nothin’ like a motel. But my sister lives up o’er yonder—” Dom paused pointing down the street to a large, shiplap house with cheery planters that looked out over the lakefront. “—and she’s been known to let her guest rooms to folks I take back and forth. Cash, o’course, strictly under the table.”

Dean laughed. “Yeah, I get it. Tell her Dom sent us, I suppose?”

“You got it, kid. I’ll see ya later, then,” the seaman replied, moving back toward The Looney with a parting grin.

Dean walked quickly back to the car, looking forward to getting back into the warm of the Impala’s interior. They’d had more clothes in the car, but even with a fresh plaid shirt and his usual short, khaki colored jacket, the wind across the freezing lake was biting.

He slid into the driver’s seat, immediately keying the engine to life.

“Everything go fine?” Sam asked.

“Yup, same deal as before, same cabins, everything. And we might be able to crash with his sister at her off-the-books smugglers bed and breakfast for the day, if we’re lucky.”

“That’s great. I don’t know about you two, but a hot shower is calling my name,” said Sam as Dean began to pull them off the quayside and onto the road proper.

“Never heard truer words,” Dean groaned slightly, rolling his shoulders. “Just the thought of hot water… and _food_ , dude. There’s a little diner type place somewhere, apparently. Hopefully she can give directions.”

“Even I have to admit a shower sounds wonderful,” Cas mused from the back. “I find myself rather reluctant to waste my grace staying clean when things as pleasant as hot showers exist.”

“Well,” said Dean, grinning back at Cas in the rearview mirror. “At least your tenure as a human gave you a better appreciation of the bunker’s amazing water pressure.”

The corner of Cas’s mouth quirked up, just enough that many would have missed it, but Dean never did. “It gave me a better appreciation of many things,” he said, looking back at Dean in the mirror.

Something warm thrummed through Dean’s chest at the angel’s casual, subtle flirtation. It was a thing that Dean never thought he’d experience, wasn’t even wholly sure that Cas was capable of. But he was, and he wanted to share it with Dean. That still left Dean with a lot of questions and a lot of fragile, terrifying hopes, but the ground felt firmer beneath his feet than it had done for a while.

Dean sneaked a look over at Sam, expecting some kind of discomfort or teasing from his little brother. But Sam merely smiled at him, warm and open and genuinely fucking pleased for him, like… just like this would always have been this easy, if Dean had just let it.

 

The building that Dom had indicated was his sister's house was only a short way up the flat road that curved around the lake edge, and in only a couple of minutes he was pulling Baby up outside.

They all hopped out immediately, Dean leading the way as they strolled up to the door.

Dom’s sister turned out to be a slightly graying, hook-nosed woman named Margaret, who greeted them with a suspicious grin, but warmed up pleasantly once Dean appropriately name-dropped her brother. A few notes were slipped across the kitchen table, and the deal was done.

“There’s already towels in the rooms for showers. If you just want to sleep all day, go ahead—if not Andy’s diner is only a mile up the road.”

They thanked her profusely, and headed up the stairs to the indicated guest rooms with more relief than she could possibly imagine.

“I’m going to crash,” Sam said, jerking his thumb toward the left-most room. “Haven’t been sleeping well recently as it is, so hiking around for a couple of days with no sleep hasn’t exactly got me feeling my best.”

Dean nodded his agreement. “Alright dude. Sweet dreams, I guess.”

Sam disappeared with a nod to Cas, and Dean pushed open the door to the room on the opposite side of the hall.

Stepping inside, he saw that it was a surprisingly nice room—not exactly chocolates on the pillows, but neat and clean, with flowery bedding and matching curtains, and a soft beige carpet. It carried the scent of one of those cheap, artificial plug-ins that people who had homes that weren’t underground bunkers sometimes had in their electric sockets. The bedding was folded back, inviting, and there were clean towels in a pile on one of the polished oak night-stands. It was homely, like a guest room at grandma's.

Dean threw down the duffle bag of clothes that they had scraped together from what was in the Impala, and nodded to himself, satisfied. Reaching his arms up above his head and cracking his back loudly, Dean moved over toward the nightstand and grabbed the top towel from the pile.

“Pretty nice room compared to what we usually end up in,” Dean said, before realizing that Cas wasn’t in the room with him.

He turned, and saw the angel stood awkwardly outside in the doorway, looking unsure.

_Oh._

“Uh, you can come in, buddy,” Dean said, a little shyer about it than he was proud of.

They were officially in awkward town.

Cas smiled and moved into the room at a sedate, careful pace, but Dean had known the angel long enough to be able to tell when he was nervous.

“Alright, Cas, close the door and sit down,” Dean said, gesturing to the bed.

Castiel blinked, his eyebrows shifting just fractionally upward, but he followed Dean’s instructions and moved to sit cautiously on the side of the mattress. He held himself stiffly, his feet flat on the floor, his hands folded neatly in his lap.

Dean put out what he hoped was a reassuringly warm smile, and reached for one of Cas’s hands, taking it between both of his. “Relax, Cas. I just think—and I feel like I deserve some credit for being the one to say this, just sayin’—that we should talk.”

Cas frowned at him deeply. “You want to talk?”

“Yes.”

“This feels very foreboding. It’s like you’re breaking up with me before we even have anything to break up from. I’m afraid I can’t allow that, Dean. It’s out of order and unnerving.”

Dean dropped his chin down to his chest, and laughed. “Well, that’s one of the topics that we should cover, I think.”

“Wait—”

“No! No, not breaking up with you. Damnit, I should have waited until I was drunk to do this.”

“You need to be drunk to talk to me?” Cas asked, but he seemed more amused than annoyed.

“At this point it seems like a good idea, but I think I’m too far in.”

“I agree. Also, it’s ten in the morning.”

“Like that matters…”

“Dean,” Cas said pointedly. “You had a topic? If you’re breaking up with me get on with it.”

“I’d at least need to have properly asked you out first.”

“First?!” Castiel’s eyebrows were now much further northwards, and the hand that was still in his lap jammed itself nervously down between his thighs.

“Son of a—no. That is not what this is. I’m usually so much smoother than this, I promise. Just apparently not with you—with you I’m a mess.” Dean’s spare hand came up to cover his face, sliding down it slowly as he exhaled.

“Yes, yes you are.”

“Let’s start again,” Dean said.

“Our entire relationship, or this awful conversation?”

“Will you shut up, please,” Dean begged.

Dean squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, tight, and when he opened them again, Cas was looking across at him with a tiny, unsure smile that looked to be a strange, buzzing mixture of amusement and nerves.

Suddenly, the way to fix everything was blindingly obvious.

Dean raised Cas’s hand, still clasped in his own, up to his lips. He pressed them lightly to the angel’s knuckles, and let them linger there while he looked up at Cas from beneath his eyelashes.

“I like you,” Dean whispered against Cas’s salty skin. “I have liked you for a very long time. Not as a friend—though you always have been, and always will be, my best friend—but something much, much more. And I’m sorry it took all of this for me to tell you that.”

A smile lit Cas’s face, slow as a sunrise, warming his cheeks and brightening the sky blue of his eyes to a cloudless, morning dazzle.

It was all Cas needed, it seemed, to find his footing and be sure.

“If you’ve waited so long, just as I have, then we shouldn’t waste any more time, Dean.”

“What do you suggest?” Dean lowered Cas’s hand back to the bed with a grin.

“I was thinking that we could take showers and then, if you’re amenable to the idea, we can both take a very long nap. As you have taken the care to state so clearly that you”—Cas pulled out the air quotes that always amused Dean—“’like me’, perhaps it's appropriate for me to tell you that your sentiment is returned, and I would like to rest here with you.”

Warmth bloomed in Dean’s chest and he grinned. “We’re going to have to work on your sexy talk,” he teased, picking the towel back up from the bed and pushing up to stand. With a playful wink, Dean leaned down, close to the angel’s face. Feeling brave, he pressed his lips to Cas’s temple before he cheekily whispered. “If you wanted to cuddle, Cas, you could have just said so.”

Cas gave him a prickly look, pushing at his shoulder. “Go and shower. You smell.”

“And they say romance is dead,” Dean threw back over his shoulder as he made his way through the door of the small, clean en-suite bathroom.

Easing out of his dirt stained, sweaty clothes was bliss. The water pressure wasn’t quite at the level of the bunker, but after several days of running for his life in the freezing snow, no sleep and no food, a dunk in a lukewarm puddle would have been a relief.

As it was, the shower was clean and modern, completely tiled and with deliciously hot water. Dean lathered himself up with the simple soap provided, sighing extensively as the warmth penetrated his muscles.

For Dean, showers had always been thinking places. Well, thinking places and also fantasizing places, but that would be a bit weird then, he thought, given that the central character of many of those fantasies was sat primly on the other side of the door.

Instead, as he massaged soap into his hair slowly, Dean thought about a plan for the day. Sleep, first of all, was top of the agenda. Then when they woke up after a decent nap, off to find the small diner for food. He wasn’t sure how long Sam would sleep, but he could take Cas with him. He could go _with_ Cas, he realized, almost like… well, like a low-key date. Would Cas be open to that kind of stuff? He couldn’t see why not; he and Cas had eaten alone plenty of times.

But now it would be different. Or they could make it different, if they wanted to.

Dean wanted to.

He’d ask Cas after the angel had showered, he decided.

Rinsing the suds from his hair and back, Dean shook himself off and stepped out of the shower. He felt like a million bucks compared to when he’d entered. He ran a hand through his wet hair, causing it to spike up wildly in a million directions. Reaching for the towel he’d left on the side of the sink, he wrapped it around his waist. Gathering up his dirty clothes with one hand, he pinned the towel in place with the other.

Cas sat on the end of the bed, having already removed the too-big spare boots of Sam’s that they’d given him from the Impala and neatly folded the jeans and AC/DC tour shirt that he’d borrowed from Dean. He sat on the bed in his boxers, a towel clutched idly to his stomach in his folded arms, gazing thoughtfully out of the window.

“All done,” Dean said. “Should be plenty of hot water left or you.”

He tossed his pile of clothes down on top of the simple dresser under the window, where Cas’s crisply stacked clothes rested. Dean felt a goofy smile easy over his face as he looked at the clothes next to each other, Dean’s discarded white undershirt sprawled part-way over Cas’s folded items.

_Well. Isn’t that something to see._

Dean turned back to the bed to find Cas’s eyes on him.

A comment demanding to know what Cas was staring at so hard was on the tip of Dean’s tongue when he noticed the angels gaze move slowly up his bare stomach to his shoulders, before sliding back down again to the haphazard towel.

Oh.

Dean swallowed hard, suddenly feeling warm despite the air seeming cool as he’d just emerged from the hot water.

Cas had stared at Dean for years, of course, but the new look was less veiled, less cautious; Cas’s eyes devoured him like a hungry lover, and it made Dean’s spine zing and shudder with possibilities.

Smiling silently, Cas stood. He stepped up to Dean, and his hand reached up to Dean’s jaw, guiding his face into a brief, chaste kiss. “I’ll shower now—get into bed Dean, get warm. Angel or no, I’m looking forward to a few hours of sleep.”

Dean nodded his agreement, desperately pushing down at his heart where it was thudding in his throat, trying fruitlessly to return it to his ribcage.

As Cas disappeared and the sound of the shower kicked in beyond the door, Dean found himself scrambling. He grabbed clean underwear from the abandoned duffle bag, before putting it up onto the dresser with his and Cas’s dirty clothes. He picked up a t-shirt, thinking to wear it to bed—but after worrying his finger along the edge of the collar for a moment, he replaced it in the pack.

In just his underwear, Dean slipped under the soft, clean sheets and waited for Cas.

He wanted to think of just Cas; let his mind linger on such pleasant, incredibly lucky things. He tried thinking of all the things they could do together, both sexy and mundane, now that they were sort-of boyfriends. But his mind drifted around of its own accord, and he couldn’t help thinking of Kevin.

What were they going to tell Linda Tran, Kevin’s mom, when they called her? Or went to see her. They should all go see her, Dean decided.

He was so wrapped up with how to break the terrible news that her beloved son was gone, that Dean didn’t immediately notice when the shower shut off and the bathroom door clicked.

Cas emerged, his hair damp and cleanly rumpled. The white towel around his waist only highlighted how tan his skin was by comparison. Dean snapped around to look at him with a little jerk of surprise as he padded across the carpeted floor, his already-worn boxers dangling casually from his hand, leading Dean’s mind to jump immediately to what was and _wasn’t_ under the towel. His eyes caught on the fresh, crisp Enochian tattoo that now graced this angel’s flank, and for a moment, a wave a guilt and sadness washed over Dean, like a habit he couldn’t quite break.

“Let it go,” Cas advised softly, and Dean realized that he was watching him and following his eyes.

“I’m trying,” Dean confessed. “But you deserved better.”

The corner of Cas’s mouth quirked up. “Then show me better, Dean.”

And it was, Dean realized, that simple. He could dwell forever on the many mistakes of the past, or he could do his best to make the future better. He tucked the blanket back around himself, putting his hand behind his head as he reclined and watched Cas, giving him a wide smile.

“Okay then. I’ll do my best, buddy.”

“No—” Cas held up a finger, from the hand not holding his underwear. “—No more buddy from you.”

Dean couldn’t help but grin. “Deal. So, what do you want me to call you instead?”

“I’m not particularly fond of pet names. They’re a human affection that I don’t much understand, I have a name already. But if anyone asks, you can call me your boyfriend,” Cas responded coolly.

“I thought I was the smooth one around here.”

Cas snorted, before giving Dean a slightly embarrassed smile. He waved Jimmy Novak’s old boxers—once white but now entirely bloodstained—vaguely from the tip of his finger, his eyes moving around the room before landing intensely on Dean. “I don’t suppose you have any—”

“No, I don’t.” Dean interrupted him, laughing. “Just drop it on the laundry pile and get your ass in here and snuggle with me, you little shit.”

Alright, so Dean hadn’t _quite_ thought it through, but he had zero regrets when Cas dropped the towel at the edge of the bed and slipped his warm, clean-smelling, and incredibly naked body under the comforter.

Even more delightful was the fact that there was no naivety in it at all; Cas slid straight up to Dean’s side, dark-eyed and smiling, and draped himself across Dean’s chest. Dean’s breath caught in the back of his throat, and Dean felt Cas’s lips curve into a self-satisfied little smile against Dean’s neck.

“Go to sleep, Dean,” Cas murmured teasingly into the underside of Dean’s jaw.

Dean wrapped his arms around his angel, grinning into the top of Cas’s hair happily. “You’re going to be handful now I’ve got you this far, aren’t you?”

“I certainly hope so, Dean.”

They slept. If Dean dreamed, he could no longer tell the difference from waking.

 

 

A soft knocking on the door several hours later woke Dean. Cas remained asleep, his face pressed into Dean’s shoulder.

“Dean?” Sam’s voice drifted through the door. “You awake yet?”

Easing his arm out from under Cas as carefully as he could, Dean padded across to the door, rubbing his eyes. “Yeah? What’s up?”

“Come out here a sec, there’s no way I’m coming in there.”

Dean opened the door and gave Sam a flat, unimpressed look. “I have underwear on and Cas is under the covers, prude.”

Sam peered almost fearfully over Dean’s shoulder, where Cas’s fresh-washed, tufty hair poked out from amongst the sheets and pillows.

“What do you want, Sam?”

His brother held up his phone. “We should be glad we knew our phones would be useless and left them in the car. The forest ranger I spoke to early this morning called me and said that the firefighters working out at Northwest Angle found our tents. They said we could head up there and get our stuff, what’s left of it.”

Dean looked back over his shoulder, to where Cas was beginning to stir, before turning back to Sam and smiling evenly. Leaving the door open, he padded over to the dresser and pulled the Impala keys from his jeans pocket.

“Here—do you mind going? I, uh, kind of have an idea to take my boyfriend for a breakfast date when he wakes up.”

A slow smile spread over Sam’s face as he took the keys. “Boyfriend, huh?”

Dean didn’t say anything; he appreciated Sam’s support, more than he’d ever say, and he didn’t want to ruin it. He shifted slightly, rubbing at the back of his head with one hand.

“Well, good for you.” Sam nodded, looking strangely proud. “Alright, well… enjoy. Can you get me something to eat on the way back?”

“Sure.” Dean nodded. Then he gave Sam a wink and shut the door in his face.

Turning around, Dean’s eyes fell back on Cas in the bed. A whoosh of warm, giddy excitement flooded over him as he saw the sleepy angel grope an arm across the other side of the bed, where Dean had been, before raising his head groggily to see where Dean had gone.

 _I can really have this_ , Dean marveled quietly.

He walked back over to the bed, sliding back in under the covers, reveling in how warm and cozy everything was after days of subzero snow. Sliding up to Cas’s back and resting his nose in the angel’s hair next to his ear, Dean slipped an arm around him and whispered, “Morning, angel.”

Cas gave a little yawn before rolling over, bringing him practically nose to nose with Dean, wrapped in his arms. “Hello, human,” he smirked.

Dean grinned, kissing Cas on the nose. “What, that pet name no good either?”

“It sounds a little strange to my ears to be addressed as my species, Dean.”

Dean squeezed Cas a little tighter for a moment, smiling wide. “But you’re not just any angel, you’re my angel.”

Cas gave a soft chuckle, which reverberated wonderfully through his chest as Dean had his arms wrapped around his ribcage. “That is true, I always have been your angel. So, I suppose I can let that one slide, on that basis.”

“How’d you feel?”

“I haven’t had much experience with it, but I believe that what I am feeling is counted as an intense form of happiness,” Cas replied seriously, his voice deeper than ever after sleep.

“I meant after sleeping, but that was an awesome answer, so I’ll take it.”

Cas smiled warmly across at him before nuzzling his face down into Dean’s neck and pressing himself sleepily against him. “Was that Sam’s voice I heard before?” he asked, buried in Dean’s collarbone.

“Yeah... Park Rangers found our tents, so Sam took the car to go get our stuff. He’ll be an hour or two,” Dean forced out calmly, suddenly very aware of Cas laid up against him, practically entwined.

Cas merely grunted to show he’d heard, not much more of a morning person than Dean was when he did sleep.

“Hey, so—” Dean paused to pull his head back, arching his spine a fraction so that he could look down at Cas. “—I was thinking that we could go and get something to eat when you’ve had a few minutes to wake up, you and me? We could walk to the diner up the street, make it some kind of little breakfast date, I suppose, as Sam’s gone.”

“You want to take me on a date?” Cas asked, solemn and curious, his head tilting slightly against the pillow as he looked back at Dean.

“Well, yeah,” Dean said awkwardly, doing his best not to blush at the fact that he was asking _Cas_ out on a date. “That’s the kind of stuff you do with a partner, Cas.” 

“I wouldn’t know,” Cas said, quiet enough that Dean suspected there was at least a little shyness in it. “I’ve never had one. But I look forward to you teaching me everything I need to know.”

“So that’s a yes?”

Cas grinned, nodding. “Of course, Dean.”

And then Cas’s lips were right _there_ , so it seemed almost silly not to kiss them. It would be, Dean decided, a huge waste not to kiss them at every opportunity.

Sometimes kissing can merely be an appetizer, a lead up to something else, but with Cas kissing was a whole meal. He gave everything to it, his hands rising automatically to Dean’s hair, threading his fingers between the strands, soft sounds falling from his slick lips as they worked at Dean’s own.

The kisses they shared were even more intense than the previous ones they’d had, amped up by the feel of Cas’s bare, supple back beneath Dean’s hands, the muscles rolling as Cas pressed forward, kissing into Dean hard.

Helpless to every sensation, Dean let out a low moan, losing himself to hot lips and solid muscles.

Cas made a similar sound after only a moment, and Dean swallowed it whole so that he could keep it forever; thrilled to be pulling noises from Cas that he’d never before heard. Instinct took over, and Dean rolled back onto the pillow, keeping Cas tight to him so that the angel rolled above him, their hips colliding—

And _god,_ Dean could feel Cas against him. Pressed into his pelvis, Cas’s cock gave a solid twitch; his total lack of clothing freed him to rub up against Dean right above the elastic of his boxers, causing lightning and thunder to throb under Dean’s skin. Dean was in exactly the same place and was one hundred percent sure that Cas could feel the same thing, pressing into his thigh.

They parted for air; their foreheads tilted together.

Cas’s unbelievably blue eyes were wide and astonished; but his pupils were dark, and his breath came in pants against Dean’s lips.

Dean was no better, his lungs stuttering as they pressed up into Cas with every inhale.

Their eyes locked for a long moment, recognizing and accepting where they were.

“Breakfast?” Cas asked, something weak and desperate about it, not sounding at all convinced.

Dean nodded, rolling his forehead against Cas’s own with the motion. “Yeah, breakfast.”

Neither of them moved.

A small, huffing laugh punched out of Dean after a moment. He tilted his head back in, laying his lips very softly against Castiel’s, so they brushed as he spoke. “Breakfast, for now. But we will revisit this—” Dean slid his hand down to tangle firmly in Cas’s hair at the nape of his neck, tugging him into a bruising, deep kiss. “—soon.”

Castiel’s eyes lit with interest. “I hope that’s a promise.”

 

 

Their breakfast date at the diner up the street from the illegal bed and breakfast had been delightfully mundane, and yet magical in every way.

They ordered pancakes and bacon; They held hands under the table.

They sat in a private corner, away from prying eyes. They wanted the privacy to exchange small, coffee-flavored kisses and occasionally shyly bring up a question about “how things would be now”. The answer, it almost always turned out, was that things would be exactly the same.

They’d kill monsters, they’d ride in the Impala, they’d research in the bunker. They’d simply add some new layers to a dynamic that already worked. They’d be private, for the most part, they decided; not from any shame at what they now were, but out of a little respect for Sam, who was forced to live with them both. And they would determinedly continue trying to communicate, to improve as they had been. To forgive. And sometimes, just to let sleeping dogs lie, and live.

Sam had spent the afternoon napping. Dean had taken Baby to Angle Inlet’s only gas station for a good wash, soaping her up as best he could until he could get her back to the bunker, where he planned to spend a good amount of time lovingly waxing away the touch of every snowflake. Cas had declined to accompany him, returning to the bed and breakfast with Sam.

As Dean had pulled away from the bed and breakfast to head to gas station, he’d seen Sam very deep in conversation with Cas, the two of them looking very serious as they headed up the path to the door. Cas was nodding, wide-eyed and solemn, and Sam looked to be lecturing… Dean was fairly certain Sam was giving him some kind of awkward dating-my-brother-chat.

Poor Cas. Dean would have to apologize to him later. Not to mention tell Sam to mind his own fuckin’ business.

With Baby clean-ish and the three of them fed once more with huge, triple-stacked burgers from the diner, they drove back down toward the quay.

“Get yourselves on quick,” Dom called down from the railing around the deck, gesturing to the ramp. “It’s damned cold. Gonna get back to Birch Beach and then let ‘er ice up for the winter, get this ol’ body down to Malibu!”

Dean laughed, his head out of the driver’s side window as he eased the Impala up the ramp. “Sounds good, Dom. Just make sure you can get us there through the ice, first!”

“The Looney ain’t ever let me down yet!”

It didn’t take long for them to get settled, and as soon as the sun dipped below the horizon Dom began a slow, winding path across the giant, freshwater lake. He was feeling chatty, it seemed, sharing with Dean, Sam, and Cas tales of the giant walleye he’d catch off the lake shore in the summer, and how the hundreds of islands that filled the lake could be almost white with pelicans at the turn of the season.

Dean smiled, nodding along, appreciating the tales of beauty but honestly glad that he had no plans ever to come back. Maybe Kevin had been onto something, with his aversion to snow camping and his propensity for Netflix.

He’d already spoken to Sam and Cas over dinner about the idea of driving through Michigan to stop by and see Linda Tran, so that they could give her awful news about Kevin in person. They were dreading it, but it seemed only right. So, with their plan already set for the next day, they left Angle Inlet far behind, and after some light socializing with Dom, headed down to their cabins for the night.

Nothing had changed at all since the last time Dean had stood in the room; beige walls, peeling safety stickers, and some clean but plain bunk beds. Their bags, which Sam had retrieved mostly intact, were already sitting on the luggage rack near the door. There wasn’t room for much else—The Looney was a cargo ship, rather than a passenger vessel. At least legally.

“I’m not sure why I’m getting tired,” Dean grumbled, shucking off his jacket and tossing it on top of the luggage rack, followed by his plaid over-shirt. “We napped for hours earlier.”

Castiel closed the cabin door, having entered slowly behind Dean, and slipped his trench coat from his shoulders. He’d seemed quite delighted to have Sam return the crumpled old thing to him, much to Dean’s amusement.

“Probably because you spent several days running around in subzero temperatures with very little sleep,” Castiel said seriously. “Humans aren’t really made for that, you know.”

Dean made a grumbling noise as he flopped down onto the iron-framed bunk bed’s lower mattress. “I miss my memory foam.”

Cas gave a low chuckle as he neatly folded the trench coat, over once and then over again. “You do insist that it’s the only way to sleep.”

“You’ll find out when we get back to the bunker, man. Endless nights of supreme comfort.”

It was only from Castiel’s sudden silence and wide eyes that Dean caught himself.

“I mean—you don’t sleep. You certainly don’t have to go anywhere near my bed. In the bunker or anywhere else. That sounded like—”

Cas quieted him by moving over to the side of the mattress, sitting down, and placing a finger over Dean’s lips. “Stop, Dean,” he said. “You didn’t say anything wrong. You’re right, of course, I don’t usually sleep. But sleeping in your bed, and sharing it with you, are two different things.”

“So, you want to?” Dean asked hopefully.

“That depends. Would I have to avert my eyes all night?” Cas slid his hand down from Dean’s lips, but left it resting tentatively on his chest below him.

Dean gave Cas a puzzled look before it clicked. “What—Oh. No. Watching me sleep from the other pillow is a little different than standing by the bed staring. I don’t mind it. In fact, it’d be nice. If you ever wanted to just…”

Dean trailed off for a moment, awkwardly shrugging against the pile of flat pillows he reclined on.

“Y’know. Be there. Waking up with someone else is pretty nice,” he finished.

Cas didn’t answer. The slow, shy smile that spread over his features was still amazing to Dean, coming from the angel whose usual modes were a simple choice between impassively stoic or impressively grumpy.

Still sat on the side of the mattress, his feet on the floor, Cas twisted to lean over Dean, bringing his head down to fasten his lips softly to Dean’s. It was a gentle, lazy, affectionate kiss and it made Dean feel warm all over in the chilly cabin.

“Hey,” Dean said, shifting over to his left and patting the space created on the mattress. “Come on down here, you. No point in you resting on the top bunk, I’ll make room. I remember how squeaky that damn thing was.”

Cas grinned, clearly remembering too, and nodded. He took a moment to take off Sam’s too-large boots. In one of Dean’s old band shirts and a worn pair of jeans from the Impala, Cas moved back over to the bed and slipped down beside Dean, laying next to him on top of the covers. He even fought Dean for half of the pillow, tugging it across from under Dean’s head and laying back onto it, facing Dean.

Dean faced him in turn, unable to stop the wide smile that felt almost uncomfortable to his cheeks.

“What?” Cas asked after a moment, watching him grin. The suspicious squint was adorable from so close, Dean decided.

“I love that you’re here,” Dean said, not processing the words before they left his mouth.

“Well, the hunt would likely have been much harder if I’d stayed at the bunker, I was the one who—”

“Right _here,_ you dork,” Dean interrupted, pushing him lightly in the chest. Instead of removing his hand after, he slid it on down to Cas’s waist, tugging him closer. “In my bed. With me.”

“Ahh, yes,” Cas replied solemnly. “That part is rather nice.”

Their lips met naturally, like they’d been doing it for a decade already rather than less than twenty-four hours. Cas kissed with so much passion, it was like he was trying to press every feeling into Dean’s skin through his lips. And Dean had no complaints, having plenty of feelings of his own that he wanted to impress on the angel in every way he could.

Dean’s hands slid around Cas’s back, feeling the way that his muscles contorted and stretched beneath the thin shirt material every time he made a short movement. Cas was pretty ripped under all those layers he usually wore, and Dean enjoyed exploring every muscle group with his fingers, letting out a soft hum as his fingers journeyed.

In turn, Cas seemed fascinated with Dean’s chest, his fingers splayed over it, softly shifting back and forth. Dean was very aware of his heartbeat, thumping under the pad of Castiel’s thumb.

When Dean’s hands travelled across Castiel’s flank, the angel let out a small huff of breath against Dean’s lips, and Dean pulled back with a devilish grin.

“Don’t tell me that the badass angel, commander of the garrison, is ticklish.”

Dean laughed at Cas’s small pout, unable to resist catching his lower lip between his teeth. The way that the angel’s eyes darkened when he did so only served to ratchet Dean’s heartbeat up another notch.

Cas kissed him back harder then, Dean’s neck burying into the pillow under the pressure. They rolled, and Dean wasn’t sure how or who initiated it, but he ended up on his back, with Cas above him, nestled between his legs. His hands roamed, one in Castiel’s hair, the other tracking down his spine to rest at the small of Cas’s back while their tongues tangled, wordless and warm in their mouths.

Dean let everything continue, perfectly satisfied how things were, for several long, sensuous minutes. Then he let his right hand move around to Cas’s hip, allowing just one thumb to slip under the fabric of the soft t-shirt and circle slowly around the sharp rise of Cas’s hipbone.

Above him, Cas’s lips stuttered, pulling back just enough to settle his eyes on Dean’s.

Breathing heavily, pinned by just how much of Cas’s blue gaze was on him, Dean very slowly, deliberately, swept his thumb back along the angel’s skin. He paused with just the tip of his thumb dipped into the waistband of Cas’s jeans, hot and purposeful and charged with words that hadn’t been said.

And then Cas’s lips were back, and his tongue returned, and the game was on.

They traded back and forth automatically, Dean’s head arching back into the pillow as Cas’s lips and teeth found his neck, sucking and nipping the day’s salt from his skin. Cas twisted and writhed as Dean’s fingers drew back up, his nails leaving light trails of possessive color against the angel’s tanned skin.

The air was charged, filled with the wet sounds of lips and tongues, and low, breathless rumbles exchanged in place of speech.

Cas drew back, sinking onto his heels, his head bent forward so he didn’t hit the bed above. His hands trailed slowly down across Dean’s chest, over his stomach, resting at his thighs. His breathing was slightly escalated; Dean watched the rise and fall of his ribcage beneath the band tee, cataloguing every twitch of Cas’s pectorals as he crossed his arms over, grabbing the hem of the shirt and pulling it over his head.

Dean just watched, drinking in the unbelievable sight kneeling between his legs.

Looking back to Dean once the tour shirt hit the floor beside the bed, Cas tilted his head endearingly, clearly noting the intensity of Dean’s gaze.

With a quiet laugh, Dean pulled up off the pillow to let his hand wander across Cas’s chest before he pulled off his own shirt. “What? Do you not realize how incredibly hot you are?”

Cas’s eyebrow raised, and his lips parted slowly.

“Say a single word about body temperature and I swear I will hit you,” Dean cautioned.

Cas’s eyes twinkled as he grinned, one hand pushing flat at Dean’s chest to ease him back onto the bed, following him down. “As long as you think that, that’s all that matters. You can think of me however you want, as long as it inspires you to put your hands on me.”

“Oh yeah?” Dean grinned wolfishly back, lifting his arms to embrace Castiel tightly. With a springy, loud protest from the mattress, Dean flipped them so that he was looking down at Cas from above. “And where exactly would you like my hands to be?”

“I, uh—” Cas’s back arched a good couple of inches off the mattress as Dean kissed his way down Cas’s sternum and on to his stomach. “I have only minimal experience with the various possibilities. But with you…”

Cas trailed off, his breath hitching as Dean slid his hands across his thighs, taking the scenic route from Cas’s hips to his zipper.

“I just want to make you feel good, okay angel?” Dean breathed against the firm skin beneath Cas’s bellybutton.

Cas was nodding emphatically. “Yes… please. You can do whatever you want—show me everything.”

Dean grinned, nipping softly at the skin before he rose back up, crawling over Cas to his lips. Kissing deeply down into the angel’s mouth, he remained poised above him, catching his eyes. “Tell me to stop if you don’t like something.”

Cas nodded, his gaze steady and filled with more trust than Dean could ever possibly deserve. “Yes, Dean.”

With that, Dean sank happily back down, his heart thudding in his chest as he curled his fingers around the button at the top of the jeans Cas wore. With a deep breath he tugged them down, shifting on the mattress to get them off Cas’s legs and onto the floor. The fact that Cas was commando beneath them made something stick in Dean’s throat, taking everything from zero to sixty in a split second.

The angel was decently hard already, their passionate making out session having got him at least some of the way to where Dean wanted him. For a churchgoing man, Jimmy Novak had a fucking sinful body, Dean decided. Thick and straight when stiff, that handful was definitely born more of the devil than it was of God, Dean would have placed bets on it.

Cas looked down at Dean, propping himself up on his elbows to take him in, his lips parted in a fantastic expression of desire and nerves all bundled into one.

Dean took his time, working kisses down the inside of Cas’s thighs, scratching his fingers lightly through the thick, dark hair that curled between his legs before he reached to wrap his hand fully around Cas’s waiting cock.

Cas gave out a small sigh as Dean finally touched him, his eyes drifting shut for a moment.

“Been waiting for that, angel?” Dean purred against the crease at the top of his thigh, sliding his tongue up and over the sharp bump of Cas’s hipbone.

“Ahhh—yes.” Cas sighed, his eyes fluttering back open to look back down at Dean, bright and eager.

Dean smiled against Cas’s skin, giving his thick, straight cock a teasing squeeze, not moving his hand just yet. “You ever touch yourself, Cas? Enjoy a little hint of that hedonism you talked about?”

A pinkness picked up in Cas’s cheeks, to Dean’s absolute delight as he sat back to take the angel in, sprawled beneath him.

“Sometimes,” he confessed, his voice a little hoarse. “Increasingly, since I came back to the bunker. Your effect on me has always been profound.”

“Oh?” teased Dean, slowly trailing his thumb up the underside of Cas’s plump cock. He slid it right to the top; enjoying the softness of the angel’s uncut foreskin sliding beneath the pad of his thumb. He wondered, briefly, if Jimmy had been uncircumcised, or if the skin he was now gently working and stretching, a droplet of pre-come oozing out to aid him, was the result of Cas’s many healings and resurrections. “Isn’t that a sin, Cas? To touch yourself like that?”

“The only sin,” Cas panted roughly, “was that it wasn’t you.”

Dean shuffled his knees forward slightly, drawing an excited creak from the mattress. With minimal encouragement, Cas parted his legs wider and tucked one either side of Dean’s hips, encompassing him. Dean rested his left hand on Cas’s hip, slowly pumping up and down his cock with the other.

Cas was delightfully responsive, shivering under Dean’s light touches.

Eyeing the thick, clear drip of pre-come that was oozing from Cas’s slit, Dean deliberately pushed his thumb through it, trailing unhurriedly back over the head, massaging evenly. A soft gasp burst from Cas’s lungs. Never taking his eyes from Cas’s own, Dean let go of Cas’s trembling dick just long enough to slowly lick the salty taste from his thumb.

“Oh—” Cas gasped out, riveted, his low tone making a sound out of the word.

Cautious, still wanting to move slowly, step by step, and ensure the angel’s comfort, Dean pushed his knees back down the mattress and bent his head. With both his hands sliding around to smooth along the sides of Cas’s ass, Dean swept his tongue around the peeking head of Cas’s cock.

Cas grunted in surprise, one of his hands abandoning the bedsheets he’d been gripping in favor of darting to grab at Dean’s bicep, his back lifting further from the bed.

“You like that?” Dean asked coyly, Cas’s thick dick resting against the corner of his lips as he spoke.

“Yes—so much—” Cas’s voice had a mesmerizingly gravelly quality to it, even deeper than usual, that Dean wanted to hear much, much more of.

Parting his lips agonizingly slowly, loving the way that Cas’s own lips parted in unison, just gasping out a breath, Dean slipped the tip of Cas’s cock into his mouth.

Dean loved the feeling of his lips stretching around it, the musky smell of Cas as he slowly took him on down, suppressing his urge to gag so that he could bury his nose into the black curls at the base. He slurped, and swallowed, and a sharp noise punched from Cas’s lungs before he began murmuring Dean’s name in sync to his head bobbing, interspersed with _Yes!_ and _Oh!_ and croaky, erotic moans that Dean would hear again in his dreams.

Cas’s hand moved from Dean’s bicep to his hair, the air around them filled with wet, filthy slurping sounds and gasped endearments. Dean worked hard, his lips hot and numb, beads of sweat meeting between his shoulder blades and slowly filling the creases in his forehead in the small, warm bunk. He didn’t want to stop; he wanted Cas to have this, to be _given_ this. He wanted to make him shudder and moan, to suck him dry and choke him down as Cas’s hips began to stutter beneath him, the tension in the angel’s body building until Dean could feel it beneath his fingers, sprayed across Cas’s sweating abs.

“Dean—Dean—” Cas gasped, desperate.

Dean merely locked their eyes together, using his hand across Cas’s stomach to push him down hard until his spine was cocooned in the mattress. His hips rose automatically, thrusting up into Dean’s mouth. Cas’s hand tightened in Dean’s hair and he fucked up hard, through the choking, gargling noises that Dean couldn’t control, until with a sharp, breathless cry, Cas finally came.

Dean sucked through it, his mouth flooded with the angel’s thick, warm spend; the taste somewhere between salty mushrooms and copper pennies, splashing against the back of Dean’s throat. He held Cas in the warmth of his mouth long after he was done, cleaning him softly with tiny licks, feeling him soften on his tongue. Finally, once his breathing turned even, Dean let him go to trail kisses up from his groin to his sternum. Moving to Cas’s side, he wrapped his arms around him, pulling him in close.

“How was that?” he whispered against the angel’s ear, unable to help his grin.

Cas pressed his fingers to the underside of Dean’s chin, turning his head with a low rumble of approval. “Beautifully sinful,” he murmured against Dean’s cheek before pressing their lips together.

They kissed for a few minutes, Cas’s hands moving over Dean’s bare chest and back, before he dropped his hands down to Dean’s zipper. He pulled back, mouthing at Dean’s jaw before he spoke.

“I hope I can return the favor,” he said quietly, his fingers teasing across Dean’s waistband.

Dean smiled, using his hands to draw Cas’s gaze to meet his own. “Just use your hands, angel,” he suggested. “I want you right here.”

Their kisses were soft and languid to start, rising in desperation as Cas jerked Dean almost to completion, pulling back right before he hit the edge, once, twice, three times. Dean moaned, burying his forehead into the angel’s shoulder.

“Fuck—Cas, please…”

“You want to come now, Dean?” Cas asked, low and coy and eternally arousing.

“God, yes, please—now, Cas—now—”

And so Cas picked up his pace, ripping an orgasm from Dean with an eager, hungry smile. Dean was helpless to do anything but bite down on his lip; grunting, twitching, shaking up against the angel as he tried not to scream out loud enough that Sam would have complaints in the morning.

Cas caught most of Dean’s forceful, sputtering emissions in his palm. His other arm wrapped around Dean tight, holding them together as they kissed through it. Raising his hand up between them, he took a tiny, curious lick, much to Dean’s amusement.

“You don’t have to do that,” Dean noted breathlessly, gradually winding his way back down from the happy, fuzzy space he was occupying.

Cas shrugged one shoulder, before reaching down to grab one-or-other of their t-shirts to wipe his hand on. “It doesn’t taste any worse to me than anything else.”

Dropping the shirt back down to the floor, Cas wiggled until he could tug the sheet out from beneath them. Tucking their feet down into the bed, they fell easily into each other’s arms. They talked quietly for almost an hour before Dean fell asleep, about nothing and everything, just filling the air between them with comfortable conversation. Cas continued to hold Dean through the night, tracing Enochian words he didn’t quite know how to say across his freckled skin.

 

 

The sun was still sluggishly creeping over the horizon, late at this time of year, as Dean pulled the Impala carefully out of The Looney’s cargo bay and down the ramp to the Birch Beach quay. Birds cried overhead, and the boardwalks nearby buzzed with people, squeezing the last bit of life out of the season before the ice robbed them of it. Thinking back to the eerily silent forest, it was the most life Dean had seen for days. Bidding Dom a cheerful, grateful goodbye, Dean navigated through the crowds of fisherman, deckhands, and buyers, before easing Baby out onto the main road.

It was surreal to be here again. Birch Beach was the same as they had left it, but they had altered. It had been a hunt which changed their lives, in more ways than one. Kevin’s seat in the back of the car was empty, Cas taking up the middle of the bench so that he could look out of the front window between Dean and Sam’s shoulders. For a small, skinny kid, he had taken up a lot of space—in the car, and in their lives. Dean knew the bunker would feel oddly empty for a while.

They turned their attention toward Michigan, and Sam pulled his laptop out of his bag, balancing it on his knees as they drove. Using the patchy wi-fi from the hotspot on his phone, Sam pulled together what money they could from credit cards and the Men of Letters’ accounts. They only spoke of it quietly, the words still seeming barbaric aloud, but they had all unanimously decided that the least they could do for Ms. Tran was to offer to pay for Kevin’s funeral expenses.

Not that they had a body to bring home.

Even Cas was quieter than usual. When pressed, he voiced a soft thought that it only made him more convinced that his Father, omnipotent as he supposedly was, cared very little for any of them. How else would he allow his own prophets, the keepers of his own word, to live and die in such terror?

Silently, Dean and Sam had nodded. If God was around, he had a lot to answer for.

Dean’s back was tense as they drove, but after another mile Cas’s hand came to his shoulder, squeezing it lightly as he suggested that they stop and get some coffee.

While Sam ducked out of the car to grab three steaming hot cups of joe from a remote gas station, Cas kissed his way through Dean’s stress, reminding him without a word that they had done everything they could.

And somehow that was it, the most important way that their lives had altered; they were settled, their many wrongs accepted, even if not forgiven. Sam smiled when he came back; Garth had called, he said, with a potential haunting down in rural Mississippi.

And so life went on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there we go!
> 
> Thank you so, so much for reading!
> 
> Please let me know what you thought--what did you think of the beast? And were you frustrated at Dean and Cas, begging them to use their words? Let me know what your favorite scene was!
> 
> You can find me [here on Tumblr.](https://malmuses.tumblr.com)
> 
> Thank you, so much. I love chatting with readers and always respond to comments, so please do say hi!
> 
> \- Mal <3


	13. Artist Thoughts

**Jdragon122’s Art Chapter**

**“The Process”**

Hello there! I hope you’ve smiled and laughed and cried on the floor in the fetal position while reading this fic as I did. It was amazing working with Mal, she is the awesomest queen of awesome! I’m so glad I had the honor of drawing for her fic :D It was so cool coming up with a fun creature design and bringing it to life! - and watching her squee in the process ;)

I know y’all are here to see how I came up with the art stuff so onto the art process!

**ART #1**

**Step 1: Designing the creature**

I know this is the second art in the fic but it’s the first I worked on. But before I even thought about the final image, the first thing I wanted to figure out was the creature design. I watched “The Ritual” and studied the movie version of the jotuun. I took note of what made it creepy: its disturbing silhouette, and combination of animal and human features meshed together to give a greater feeling of  _ wrong _ . I wanted to try and mimic a similar sense of horror without copying the movie version.

 

 

This was my first go at the design to get my imagination flowing. I took the already designed creature and Mal’s descriptions and tried to draw whatever I thought of first. Immediately, I noticed that by using a deer/horse-like skeleton as the movie had, my creature and theirs would look too much alike. So I took a different approach.

 

 

Here, I used a completely different animal as my base: a bear, specifically a starving bear. Given that bears and elks are both Scandinavian symbols, I thought it appropriate to the lore - and I thought that the low stooping head of a bear might add to the creep factor. After that I stuck a horse skull on it - and still wanting to pay homage to the original design, added horns (embedded where eyes would be) and the hidden face and human arms. I thought having the “face” where a throat would be, would be even more disturbing and make a hypothetical first glimpse of the monster surprising and more horrifying. I imagined the “open” bottom jaw would be closed at rest, hiding the human part of the creature until it was provoked and the skull would slowly open to reveal it’s true face.

 

 

Just for fun, I did another, more detailed sketch where I added a couple more features, some texture and a more stooped posture :D Monster done!

**Step 2: Thumbnails**

Now that the monster was designed, it was time to plan the final art piece. This is actually the first challenge I have done using thumbnails. Having just learned their usefulness in art class, I decided to put it into practice. I had a general idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted to have 1) strong contrasting light and 2) a composition that led to the focal point (the monster). So I quickly drew out 4 thumbnails

 

 

 

 

 

After drawing them out I chose my favorite, which was the second one! I liked the pose and the lighting much better than the others.

 

 

And from a compositional standpoint, I think it added more flow/movement to the composition. Aaaand it’d be nice to show off the whole monster since my other thumbnails hid the monster somewhat ;)

So now that I knew what I was going to do, onto the actual arting!

**Step 3: The Arting**

The first thing I did was do a color overlay of my thumbnail that I would use as a base to draw over for the final piece. This way I could see where my main lighting would be and how I wanted the lighting to go.

  
  


First, I started with the skull. For this, I found a 3D model of a horse skull online that I posed it and took screenshots of. I transformed them how I wanted in PS then painted over them, making sure to exaggerate the contrasting lighting.

 

Next, I added texture to the wood, used a tree brush for the background forest, outlined some of the body details and sketched how I’d pose Dean.

After finding a Dean reference photo, I traced and color blocked him and started to add some more grass texture. Once that was done I focused on the lighting, adding the fire, some fog and more glowy lighting effects. I wanted to try and push the contrasts as much as I could.

 

Using a nifty tutorial I found online, I tweaked the fire (erasing some of the fire edges and adding more red color) and fully blended Dean and the jotuun’s body. The last step I did was the ice claws which I made by area selecting each different “plane” of the claws and using the gradient tool to fill it is. Afterward, I went back and filled in the gaps with the appropriate lighting color, added texture using an ice brush and adjusted the shading with a “Multiply” layer.

 

 

**Step 4: The Gif**

It’s taken me a while to learn how to add gifs into my art without having to animate it on my own frame by frame. But with this piece, I finally made a leap in my progress. I found a gif of embers and breath with black backgrounds. When I switched the layers to the “Lighter Color” setting, the black disappeared and left only the parts of the gif I wanted.

 

 

I positioned them where I wanted then opened the PS Timeline (Window > Timeline) Both gifs were 33 frames long. I organized the gif frames into their own groups and opened 33 frames, going through each of them, turning the layers on and off in order from 1 to 33.

For the blinking, I simply made 3 layers: each covering slightly more of the eyes until there were invisible. Then I turned the layers on in the frames that I wanted.

For the fire glow, I do as the lovely thefriendlypigeon does by alternating the layer opacity of the glow in intervals of 10-20, as shown in this tutorial:  [ https://thefriendlypigeon.tumblr.com/post/167558828509/your-animations-are-so-stinkin-cool-can-you ](https://thefriendlypigeon.tumblr.com/post/167558828509/your-animations-are-so-stinkin-cool-can-you)

And there you have it! A gif! :D

 

 

**ART #2:**

This art involved a lot less planning and a lot more shortcuts that I wanted to try out. For this I headed straight into the art, again starting with a th umbnail. I sketched the basic colors and composition.

 

 After that, I took part of an image I found of a snowy forest and made it the background of the piece and I found another Dean reference that I cut out and pasted in.

 Everything pasted, the big tree in the foreground sketched out, and I’m ready to add more details.

Next, using a tree image, I pasted it in and added a layer mask so that it filled over the tree sketch underneath. Then using some texture brushes I added the scratch marks to look like bare bark. I added a small vignette and added some basic shadows using “Multiply” layers to further push the lighting and focus on Dean.

More texture time! Since I didn’t want this piece to look completely like a photo manipulation, I added paint looking elements to better convey the snowiness of the scene. I added some ice and leaf texture, used a smoke brush to mimic the snow and painted over Dean a little, adjusting his coloring to better fit the scene.

 fter that, I added some blood using the same smoke brush and added this gif over the image as an “Overlay” layer.

 

 

 

 

And there you have it! :D I know this was probably very long lol, but if you happen to want to know more or want any tips feel free to ask/message me on tumblr! (insert link:  [ https://jdragon122.tumblr.com/ ](https://jdragon122.tumblr.com/) ) Thank you so much for reading this amazing fic, Mal deserves all the love! And I hope you enjoyed this little look into my art process as well. This was an amazing experience :) and I hope you guys enjoyed it just as much!

<3

And if y’all happen to see more of my stuff, feel free to look through my art tag ( [ https://jdragon122.tumblr.com/tagged/jdragonart ](https://jdragon122.tumblr.com/tagged/jdragonart) ) or art shop ( [ https://www.redbubble.com/people/jdragon122?ref=account-nav-dropdown&asc=u ](https://www.redbubble.com/people/jdragon122?ref=account-nav-dropdown&asc=u) )!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU!
> 
> I really hope that you enjoyed this fic! Working with jdragon was amazing and I am so, so happy with how everything turned out!
> 
> Did you like our Destiel case fic? What did you think of the monster?
> 
> Please leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts!
> 
> \- Mal <3


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